Talk:Scientific consensus on climate change

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IPCC/Other reports structure

This is all highly relevant information for this article, but I really do not like how we present it right now.

• We do not actually explain anywhere what the IPCC even is, and what makes it so important. Sure, we all know it, but it's the people who don't who need this article. The sentence we currently have before the AR6 excerpt - "Synthesis reports are assessments of scientific literature that compile the results of a range of stand-alone studies in order to achieve a broad level of understanding, or to describe the state of knowledge of a given subject"' is...really not great for that.

• The AR6 excerpts just do not seem to be fit for purpose. My impression is that for a typical reader of this particular article (again, remember that anyone who needs to read about scientific consensus that the warming is even proceeding in the first place is really unlikely to have an intuitive grasp of the higher-level details after that fact), it's just going to be wall of text full of unfamiliar terms. I.e. Mitigation has increased, but even if NDCs announced by October 2021 will be met, warming will likely exceed 1.5 °C in the 21st century and it is hard to limit warming to 2 °C. There are gaps between really implemented policies and NDCs. Financing is insufficient to meet mitigation goals. - This article does not explain anywhere what an NDC is. It does not explain anywhere why those temperature targets are even important. The phrases which I think are likely to make an impression (i.e. Choices made in next years will have impacts for thousands of years or With more warming, long-term negative impacts are many times higher than current, there is more likelihood of abrupt and/or irreversible changes, risks, low-likelihood events with very large negative impacts, losses and damages, climatic and non-climatic impacts, increasingly interacting, compound and cascading, more complex and difficult to manage. are buried in a thicket of phrases which aren't, like There are gaps between really implemented policies and NDCs. Financing is insufficient to meet mitigation goals.

• We probably devote too much space to excerpting the details of how AR6 was published (i.e. The panel published a longer report, a summary for policymakers a presentation and a short "Headline Statements" document, summarizing its findings in 3-4 pages.) and we definitely do that for AR5.

• The points which are summarized for AR5 and AR4 (unprecendented rate of warming, greenhouse gas levels approaching million-year peaks, unequivocal human influence, sea level rise, future warming stressing societies and ecosystems, etc.) are really the core of what we need to summarize from the reports, not the weeds which the AR6 excerpt gets into. We need to briefly cover those points for AR6, and then entries for all of the previous reports - from AR5 to FAR - should really only list the points of divergence. That is, people should be able to see how the scientific consensus had evolved and strengthened from report to report.

• The same applies for "other reports". We need a brief summary of the current National Climate Assessment (#5, which is apparently brand-new) and then 1-2 line mentions of the previous four assessments. On the other hand, Arctic Climate Impact Assessment is from 2004, and it seems like the Arctic Council has not done any follow-up after that. We could combine it with NOAA's Arctic Report Cards, or just leave it be, and instead include things like the European Climate Risk Assessment and hopefully something outside of the Global North as well.

InformationToKnowledge (talk) 11:34, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

I agree with you on this and have made some bold changes: removing the excerpts and content from the previous three assessment reports. I think perhaps the way forward is to rather introduce the existence of those important reports (with the IPCC reports as standing out as the most important one) but without listing any of their key findings (because then you have the problem of where do you start, where do you end). The key points should anyway already be part of the section "Consensus points". Please see also related discussion on the talk page of IPCC Sixth Assessment Report where I have questioned if and how we list the key points from the synthesis report. EMsmile (talk) 12:36, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Now that I think about it, "Consensus points" should probably be specifically about a list of dotpoints, each ideally cited to multiple highest-grade sources (i.e. AR6 and one other major report, statement from a major organization, review in a high-tier journal, etc.) The list of dotpoints would then become a lot longer than now, and the three paragraphs after those dotpoints would be moved to some other section.

There's other clean-up we can do here, but I think that would be particularly important. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 14:57, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

I went ahead with a version of this now. "Consensus points" have been expanded substantially with the points where I could specifically find similar or identical language in both the AR6 and NCAR5 summaries, to underscore the strength of the consensus. As I have been short on time, the list of points is largely limited to general science for now: impacts and mitigation/adaptation can follow later, if we have agreement on this format.

The rest has been condensed - quoted statements made in 2000s (or blockquotes from decade-old reports, for that matter) are unlikely to be as persuasive to readers in 2020s as they were back then, and now that the excerpts from the IPCC/NCAR are gone, it seems to me like the need to include subheadings for them is also gone, and it's more impactful to briefly talk about what they do early on "Existence of a scientific consensus", before the prospective reader had time to lose interest. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 17:41, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

Formatting of references after split

Hi User:Isaidnoway thank you for cleaning up the reference errors after a split off a large chunk of text into a sub-article. I was hoping some bot would fix it because I didn't understand how these ref errors came about. Is this a very old style of setting up the refs? Normally when I move a text block to another Wikipedia article, the refs get move with it except for those under "sources" if it's done in the short ref style. Long ref style is so much better. How could I have done it differently (for next time)? EMsmile (talk) 10:11, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

EMsmile - No, this is not a very old style of setting up the refs, it is a very popular style, still in use. List-defined references are where the references are defined in the References section, as opposed to being defined in the body of the article. Once the ref is defined in the references section, then you just use — <ref name="whatever your ref name is"/> — in the body of the article. This style avoids cluttering the text in the body of the article. Once you remove a list-defined reference from the body of the article, then you must go to the References section and comment it out using <!-- -->, as seen here, or in the alternative, just delete the list-defined reference from the References section. Failing to do either one of these remedies, will result in this, with multiple cite errors. Additionally, when you split off content that is using this style, like you did here for this article, you must also copy the list-defined references to the new article, or else you will end up with cite errors as seen here in the new article. I added those missing list-defined references to the new article to fix those cite errors. For further info, see WP:LDRHOW.

Additionally, when you split off content and copy/paste into a new article, you really should follow Step 4 per WP:CORRECTSPLIT - "Contents [[WP:SPLIT]] from [[Source article name]]; please see its history for attribution." - in order to give proper attribution to the editors who originally added it in the source/parent article. Hope this helps. Thanks for reaching out. Isaidnoway (talk) 13:27, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for taking the time to explain this to me, much appreciated! I wasn't fully aware of this ref style. But I don't understand in which sense this is an advantage: "This style avoids cluttering the text in the body of the article." There is no visible text for readers or for any editors who edit in visual editor, only for those editors who edit in source editor, right? To me it seems to be adding a big disadvantage for the case where text is moved from one Wikipedia article to another. But I'll pay more attention to this in future.

How did you solve it after I had done the damage: there is a script that can be used to fix this? EMsmile (talk) 17:39, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

@Isaidnoway tried, but hasn't actually solved this, unfortunately. Only three of the missing references were carried over. I moved several more just now as part of a wider rewrite, but I am sure there are a lot more, since many statements in the new article remain unreferenced. It seems like one would have to dive into the past revisions and copy those references from there. Just one more reason to be careful and not rely on the visual editor so much. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 17:31, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

InformationToKnowledge - Sadly this is what happens when a split is not done properly. This is the version of the article as it existed immediately before the split-off, and here is a version from Dec 10, before the heavy editing started on Dec 21. So it is possible to see what refs were present at those times, and then one could open up the edit window on either of those versions, find the refs and copy them over. Hope this helps. Maybe after Christmas, I'll take another look. Isaidnoway (talk) 18:25, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

So this is the script that can be used to fix this? Looks a bit complicated to me: User:Kaniivel/Reference Organizer. It only fixed some of it? Again, sorry for causing this problem with the refs. I've done many mergers and splits before but apparently none of them used that style of referencing, so I hadn't run into that problem before. I still don't understand why anyone would use that style (see my question above). If we want more new editors to come and join us we should keep it simple for them. This means using long ref style and letting them use visual editor as the default (my opinion). EMsmile (talk) 18:50, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

Section on consensus points

I've just added this intro sentence to the section on consensus points: The current scientific consensus regarding causes and mechanisms of climate change, its effects and what should be done about it (climate action) is that: but then I realised we are not including any bullet points about climate action. Is that on purpose? I think there are some general statements we could add there as consensus points about adaptation and mitigation, couldn't we? Perhaps it would be useful to give this section a sub-structure so that we can group it broadly along the lines of WG I (causes and mechanisms), WG II (effects and adaptation), WG III (mitigation). Perhaps take from here but be careful of copyright infringement (?): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Sixth_Assessment_Report#Synthesis_report_for_all_three_working_group_reports EMsmile (talk) 18:44, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

I think I have already explained this in my December 24th comment at "IPCC/Other reports structure" section, though I'll admit it's now a more than few posts up and can be easily overlooked.

TLDR; this clean-up and list of points was about as much as I was willing/able to do for this article at the end of 2023. I'll certainly be adding more points on those subjects once I have the time for it in 2024. Further, I think my decision to cite both IPCC and NCAR (or potentially another gold-standard source) for every bullet point should insulate the article from this; WP:LIMITED is a lot easier to argue when similar phrasing is used in two separate references. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 14:58, 29 December 2023 (UTC)