Talk:Climate crisis

Parallel draft by ITK

(continued from above, "Merger proposal")

Once again, I believe that this characterization of the subject matter is flawed. However, you are right that the "essay"-length arguments here haven't done much, so instead, I'll simply present my draft of what I want the merged article to look like.

User:InformationToKnowledge/New_Climate_Crisis_Draft

It discusses the terminology, chronicles its evolution and provides the scienific context required to help the readers truly understand it. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 17:44, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Oy. Upon my first read of your Draft, I think it's a long essay on a different topic, and doesn't conform so well to Wikipedia norms. For example, physically, the lead section is much too detailed. Substantively, the Definitions section has content (like Tipping points) that exceed the scope of what a "definition" is. Procedurally, it's an immense change from the present article which makes it practically impossible to make a before-and-after comparison re replacing an article that resolved its scope after long and difficult discussions and has since been stable. I can understand the impulse to warn readers of what the climate crisis can become, but you are really talking about another article and not amending this article about the term climate crisis. Your extensive draft doesn't merely provide what you call "context"; you must apply WP:TOPIC to this article about the term. You can obviously make valuable contributions to this encyclopedia, but I've never actually seen a wholesale replacement of an established article on this website. Never. —RCraig09 (talk) 18:06, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

... and in a few spots, I'm worried about WP:SYNTHESIS issues in unsourced sentences that seem like your own editorial summaries.

There's some valuable (though wildly out-of-scope) content there, so maybe an entirely separate article would be best (it would be hard to name). Separately, some content might be introduced, in small steps, to Climate communication or respectively into some of the articles in the /* See also */ section. —RCraig09 (talk) 18:39, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Lead section: I was told earlier that the lead should be as detailed as needed to summarize all of the article, and that the ideal structure is four paragraphs and around 500 words. It is currently four paragraphs and 396 words.

Definitions: as you can see, I merged your "Scientific Basis" and "Definition" sections into one, because frankly, if you need a hidden comment to explain to the editors what the title of the section really means, it's not a good title, period. Maybe "Definitions" isn't the best title either, but calling it "Scientific Basis" inherently encourages the reader to think of the basis for why climate change is bad, and results in an unneeded confusion.

WP:SYNTHESIS: Please elaborate.

WP:TOPIC: Once again, I believe that the current article's scope is restricted far too narrowly, to the point where it outright crosses the line into WP:OVERSIMPLIFY and WP:CHERRY. Notably, the way the article is currently written implies that the key watershed was the publication of the third World Scientists' Warning to Humanity, which had emerged (seemingly) out of nowhere and then its publication had finally spurred the formal adoption of the term. This also preserves a clear separation between the term of the article and all the nasty apocalyptic scare stories.

It's a nice story. Too bad the timeline doesn't match.

Simply put: that third Scientists' Warning was published in November 2019. Yet, a Nature article published in September 2019 says that over 1,000 jurisdictions have already declared a climate emergency by then. The warning thus followed in the wake of this culture shift: it did not spur it on. If we are to credit someone with that shift in language, our main options are Al Gore and Antonio Guterres as initiators and Greta Thunberg and Katharine Viner as those who have done the most to build on it. As you can see, none of the four are scientists.

Your primary argument in opposing the merge and the changes in the draft essentially comes down to preserving the distinction between what you think is "the widely-used term Climate crisis" and "just another dramatic hyperbolic scare-scenario like CEndgame and CApocalypse". The fatal flaw with this line of thought is that in the real world, this distinction is so fluid that virtually all of the key sources cited in this article also have significant overlap with the subjects of the other two.

Consider that while Guterres was one of the most important high-profile figures to start using crisis/emergency terminology (as even the current article acknowledges), he had also used a range of other terms, as I chronicle in my draft. In fact, I got his statement about "path to suicide", from the CApocalypse article, where it is currently cited.

Consider that your current version of the article has two short paragraphs in its "Scientific Basis" section, with the first one devoted to that Scientists' Warning from 2019. Later on, you confusingly cite the follow-up 2021 warning in "Recent", lumping it in with all the media and political declarations (I chose to split those into separate sections and move the 2021 Warning to the same section as the 2019 one). You know who else cites both that 2021 warning and Guterres' statements? One of the PNAS replies to the "Climate endgame" paper, Climate change and the threat to civilization, which begins with the following observations.

In a speech about climate change from April 4th of this year, UN General Secretary António Guterres lambasted “the empty pledges that put us on track to an unlivable world” and warned that “we are on a fast track to climate disaster” (1). Although stark, Guterres’ statements were not novel. Guterres has made similar remarks on previous occasions, as have other public figures, including Sir David Attenborough, who warned in 2018 that inaction on climate change could lead to “the collapse of our civilizations” (2). In their article, “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2021”—which now has more than 14,700 signatories from 158 countries—William J. Ripple and colleagues state that climate change could “cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable” (3).

Because civilization cannot exist in unlivable or uninhabitable places, all of the above warnings can be understood as asserting the potential for anthropogenic climate change to cause civilization collapse (or “climate collapse”) to a greater or lesser extent. Yet despite discussing many adverse impacts, climate science literature, as synthesized for instance by assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has little at all to say about whether or under which conditions climate change might threaten civilization. Although a body of scientific research exists on historical and archeological cases of collapse (4), discussions of mechanisms whereby climate change might cause the collapse of current civilizations has mostly been the province of journalists, philosophers, novelists, and filmmakers. We believe that this should change.

Moreover, your second paragraph in the "Scientific Basis" is devoted entirely to a Nature commentary warning about tipping points. Now, two authors of that commentary, Schellnhuber and Rockström, have both opined that the warming of 4+ degrees would, in their view, reduce the present human population to a fraction of its size: Schellnhuber is also already quoted in the CApocalypse article explicitly warning of civilizational collapse in that scenario. Most importantly, all but one of the authors of that Nature commentary have proceeded to contribute to "Climate endgame". So, the very scientists your version of the article credits with providing "Scientific Basis" for the "Climate Crisis" term have also originated the "Climate Endgame" term.

In all, while it is certainly possible to assert climate crisis without believing that it would go as far as the apocalyptic outcomes of substantial fraction of the human population dying due to its effects and/or the collapse of organized society/civilization in some form (let alone the ultimate apocalyptic outcome of human extinction/extinction of life on Earth), as evidenced by a substantial fraction of IPCC scientists or the Ghastly Future paper I linked in my draft and at the start of the thread, this distinction is not made by all of the most high-profile advocates of this term. Considering this, it makes no sense to keep the articles separate. In fact, I would go as far as to say the current version of the article effectively conceals crucial information from the reader about the openly stated beliefs of most of its sources. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 03:51, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

Your continued essay-ing makes it difficult to be brief in response, but I'll try:

— This encyclopedia article (not a comprehensive essay) is purposely directed narrowly to the term climate crisis, not to what the real-world climate crisis might hypothetically become. If you want to change the scope of an article, you are talking about another article altogether.

— The /* Scientific basis */ section was a late insertion to assuage some editors' fear that readers would get the idea that the term "climate crisis" was merely alarmist hyperbole. The purposely-brief /* Scientific basis */ section has served its purpose and should not be embellished beyond the article's scope; the basis for rational concern is expressed in the Climate change article.

— What cited authors have elsewhere stated/implied about the real-world climate crisis hypothetically becoming (apocalypse/endgame), is irrelevant. For you to assemble their "other" statements in the essay as you have, is your own editorial WP:SYNTHESIS. Related: your assertion that a "distinction is not made by all of the most high-profile advocates" is your own (doubtful) personal opinion, and does not destroy the distinctions.

— Your essay tries to cover too many mutually distinct subjects for a single encyclopedia article:

1. linguistic terms per se versus physical-reality scenarios
2. present reality versus hypothetical future realities
3. reliable-source terminology versus alarmist hyperbole
4. (possibly other distinct subjects I haven't noticed)

— I think some of your essay's content would be valuable if distributed among various existing articles (e.g., Climate communication), but your essay goes wildly beyond the scope of the term "climate crisis"—or any other single subject for that matter. If you were to submit it as a standalone article, what article name would summarize both sides of all 3+ items in my list? Please answer that question in ~six words or less (no more essays, please). —RCraig09 (talk) 05:27, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

Just letting you know that I would rather give other editors a chance to see my draft and comment on it before taking this discussion further. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 05:58, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Article name (location for extreme-scenario content)

What article name would summarize both sides of all 3+ items in my list? It's the threshold question defining where your new content belongs. —RCraig09 (talk) 06:17, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Look, I would simply disagree that the current structure of the article is out-of-scope. Since your position is very clear, I have been curious as to what the other editors might say.

However, I do have an alternative proposal.

1) Everything in my draft up until "Language drift and common misconceptions" is moved into the current article. Nearly all the content there is the same as in the current article, only rearranged to be more navigable. There are relatively few new additions.

2) Everything starting from the second paragraph of "Language drift and common misconceptions" (since the first simply paraphrases your "alternative terminology" section, which I guess will just stay more-or-less as is) is used as a basis for an article with one of the following titles:

Catastrophic risks of climate change

OR

Climate change and human survival

OR

Climate change and civilization

And then CApocalypse and CEndgame are turned into redirects to that article. All of the proposed titles can be argued with (and I'm open to other suggestions), but all of them are far better than CApocalypse, which simply sounds like a competitor term to CCrisis and provokes confusion. (Imagine readers' reaction if both articles were included in the climate change template under their current names, rather than just this one.) InformationToKnowledge (talk) 06:51, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

I struggle to follow this exactly but I do find it an interesting conversation between two people with a lot of climate change knowledge. Is there an easy way to see in the draft article which parts are new & different to climate crisis and which are the same? And I do like the idea of having an article under the topic of Catastrophic risks of climate change (or similar title), rather than climate apocalypse. However, wouldn't it overlap a lot with Tipping points in the climate system (and also with effects of climate change) - or how would you ensure that they go neatly hand in hand and don't overlap too much. Also, is some of your text too much written like a literature review and with original research? There is a guidance called "Cite review articles, don't write them." (WP:MEDRS). Just wondering. EMsmile (talk) 11:33, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

"Extreme climate change scenarios" neutrally captures what is distinct from this "Climate crisis" article—which has been stable in scope after extensive group discussion three years ago. —RCraig09 (talk) 16:50, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Well, the idea is to have an article whose purpose would be to silo off the claims of climate change leading to societal collapse and/or human extinction, combined with their treatment in media and scientific literature. Essentially, an article which would be excerpted in the "Possibility of societal collapse" section of Effects of climate change: currently, it links to CEndgame and Global catastrophe scenarios (which is a messy and sensationalistic article itself). Confusingly, the latter then mainly quotes from CApocalypse - providing further proof why a more clear and focused article is needed.

However, making this goal sufficiently explicit in the title of the article is a key issue. I agree that "Catastrophic risks" title is not ideal because the threshold of what should count as a catastrophe is subjective, and it typically stops well below a collapse of civilization and the like. I also do not think the proposal made by @RCraig09 fits, because "Extreme climate change scenarios" implies a sort of parity between the subject matter of the article and Climate change scenario, which is very far from the truth.

This is why I am leaning more and more towards Climate change and human carrying capacity, since it gets to the heart of the matter - papers, articles, etc. asserting that climate change will result in mass mortality and/or permanent reduction of population from its present/near-future size and/or permanent reduction in the technological or social complexity would all go there, and nothing else would. This would help a lot to clarify the distinction between those and the consensus body of science. As a bonus, it could also help with cleaning up the carrying capacity article, which is pretty messy itself. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 06:41, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

There's another related article that I just came across: Extinction risk from climate change. It talks about extinction risk for plants and animals but maybe it could be folded in as well, or at least looked at and improved. - I'm not sure about your proposed title of Climate change and human carrying capacity; seems a bit academic and might linger with low pageviews. EMsmile (talk) 09:11, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Trust me, I know that article very well; after all, I rewrote it almost entirely over these past few days! I strongly believe its scope should be limited to a list of reliable projections on plant and animal extinctions related to climate change specifically which would not fit anywhere else, and that is what I made that article into.

A section about speculation on human extinction and the like would not only look very awkward next to a wave of peer-reviewed studie, but it would not even help with discovery of the topic - right now, the "exinction risk" article receives far fewer views than the more general-purpose Holocene extinction anyway. (And Holocene extinction could probably do with a clean-up itself.)

I think that if the "Carrying capacity" article is linked throughout Wikipedia on every relevant article (i.e. if it was linked to on the "main" carrying capacity article, if the "extinction risk" article got an "about" note directing readers there for a discussion of human extinction, if effects of climate change and global catastrophe scenarios both excerpted it, etc., then the views would soon be adequate for its purpose. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 18:31, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

ITK: as a rule, it's best to make changes incrementally with specific edit comments, especially in your first few thousand edits on Wikipedia.^{(totally new articles excepted since there was nothing to "change" to begin with)} Incremental changes let the community of editors see what is proposed, and respond accordingly before anyone has spent inordinate amounts of time. Subject matter expertise is very different from Wikipedia experience, and massive changes can be disruptive and can be interpreted as a violation of WP:OWN. Related: brevity is king, both in the article space and on Talk Pages. —RCraig09 (talk) 18:49, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

If this is no longer about climate crisis, should the discussion rather continue at the talk page of WikiProject Climate Change? And I don't like the proposed title with carrying capacity in it - nobody searching on Wikipedia (or even on Google) would search for that term. Also I have my concerns about the article Extinction risk from climate change and have written on the talk page there (I think the title or the scope needs adjustment; also it's written like a literature review and is not encyclopedic in this current format). EMsmile (talk) 22:30, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Experience tells us the discussion will explode in verbiage that should not burden the WikiProject. The fact that we're having so much trouble naming the article, shows how unfocused the essay content is. Someone could initiate the Talk Page of ITK's essay itself, and maybe link that Talk Page on the WikiProject. But first, the essay should be renamed/moved to a place that doesn't have "Climate crisis" in the title. Probably, the essay's content will be broken up and dispersed across articles as part of the Apocalypse/Endgame cleanup/merger. —RCraig09 (talk) 23:38, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

I understand that my approach is unusual and can be troublesome to deal with, but consider the flip side, which is WP:NOW. We are not discussing how to best improve articles on ancient history: the quality of the information we end up presenting in these articles has clear real-world ramifications. Perhaps my writing slips into essay style (repeatedly calling it that is less clever than you think), but that's what happens when I try to move fast and build things.

Anyway: I followed up on my earlier suggestion and split the draft in two.

User:InformationToKnowledge/New Climate Crisis Draft - same link as before. Same scope as this article now, only 592 words larger, and I consider its layout superior to the present version.

User:InformationToKnowledge/Climate change and civilizational collapse draft - the article where I suggest we ultimately merge CApocalypse and CEndgame to. Still an early and clearly rough version. I suppose that further discussion should indeed take place on its talk page. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 10:34, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

— Especially for new editors, the preferred way to edit articles is to do so incrementally, with specific edit comments, so the community can understand any reasoning for each change. One should not submit an entire replacement of an established article that requires others to compare two ~3,000-word documents!

— The Apocalypse/Endgame material definitely belongs in an article separate from this Climate Crisis article. —RCraig09 (talk) 16:44, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

• Support for merging Climate apocalypse and Climate endgame articles into an article about "Climate change and civilizational collapse" and that the article is named Catastrophic risks of climate change with the former redirecting to that.

This article should then be linked from Global catastrophic risk either be partly transcluded to or improve Global catastrophe scenarios#Climate change. The climate crisis article should also contain sufficient info and a lead-wikilink about this. I haven't checked the draft(s) in detail but the general concept and work is due and needed, some possibly useful media for it can be found in this new commons cat.

No valuable information from the two articles should be lost but sections should be short (keep it brief and add subsections). I think it would be good if the article was moved to article-space asap and that it is structured by issues, topics, risk-elements, etc instead of chronological albeit the "Modern discussion" section could be kept as is even if that means some contents are slightly duplicate (reader can choose to read by chronological order or by topics).

Prototyperspective (talk) 10:51, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Just a house keeping update: in the meantime, the article Climate endgame has been merged into Climate apocalypse. Discussions about this, and further work, are available here at the WikiProject Climate Change talk page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Climate_change#Climate_apocalypse_and_climate_endgame_articles EMsmile (talk) 13:18, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Some small suggestions

I have a few small suggestions for improvements or points for discussion:

1. There seems to be a mixture in formatting for terms: sometimes they are in italics, sometimes in quotation marks. Shouldn't they all be in italics unless they are actually quotes? Or perhaps I am missing something.
2. I've just swapped the image in the lead as I felt it should rather be an image about the term, not about the scientific basis. Just to ensure that when readers come to this page they get a quick visual clue. The graph that was there before fits better as the lead image for climate communication (which already uses a similar stripe chart).
3. Do we really need the "further reading" section? Who decides what's in there? I would delete it. If there are any important publications in there then surely they are already used as in-line citations, or should be.
4. Should we change the quality label from C to B?
5. Three of the references go to Twitter, which gets marked up in read in the Unreliable Script plug-in. Should we remove/replace the? Or can we make an exception here. EMsmile (talk) 07:45, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

1.  Done Now italicized.

2.  Needs discussion A difficult choice, because naming something is an abstract process and difficult to "picture". Google Trends chart is OK (I plan to update it), though I'm thinking of a quote box with text from the 2020 Bioscience article:

"Despite 40 years of global climate negotiations, with few exceptions, we have generally conducted business as usual and have largely failed to address this predicament. The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity."

3. N The "Further reading" entries provide longer discussions of the issue of how to name climate change. They're not cited for minor specific content in the Wikipedia article. On balance, they're reliable and the section should stay.

4. N As a main editor, I'm too biased to change the article rating myself. Not an impactful decision, anyway.

5. N Twitter is as reliable a source as its account owner (note the Twitter accounts, @IPCC_CH, @NASA, @NOAA). Also, some of the three Twitter references are cited for what the tweet says along the lines of a primary source. They should stay.

—RCraig09 (talk) 16:59, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. Further replies: to 1: I see many more instances where terms need to be italicized in this article. I've changed a few of them in the top third of the article but stopped after a while in case my edits would cause disagreement (?).

To 2: I don't think a quote would be suitable as a visual representation in the lead. This particular quote is rather lengthy and doesn't really talk about the term climate crisis but about the topic itself. The quote would be OK for somewhere further down but it really is just an example of a prominent source using the term but not about discussing the term's strengths and weaknesses.

To 3: Such a "further reading" section will be another section that will need to be carefully curated and updated from time to time. But I don't feel strongly about it. If you want to keep and update it from time to time, no problem.

To 4: I've changed it to B now. I think that's fair. Overall, it's quite a high quality article (thanks for all your work on this. According to "Who wrote that" you wrote 78% of this article.)

To 5: Regarding twitter, it's generally regarded as unreliable (see here), but for this particular purpose where you just want to show that someone is using the term, it should be OK as a source, I guess. EMsmile (talk) 21:50, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Explanation regarding my readability edits

This is regarding RCraig's comment in the edit summary "PLEASE insert <ref.../> tags if you feel you must explode a sentence". Firstly, what do you mean by "exploding a sentence"? This sounds rather negative. I have broken some long sentences into two or three, yes. I think this is normal practice when trying to improve the article's readability. Have you looked at the readability tool for this article? I am currently going through it and tackling those paragraphs where all the sentences are in dark red (= hard to read).

When I break a long sentence into 3 shorter sentences, I think it is not necessary to add the same ref to the end of each sentence UNLESS it is not clear (logically) that the sentences belong together. For example take this case: "There are several examples to explain this phenomenon. One of them is the lack of XX. The other one is the abundance of XX." --> These three sentences can just have one ref at the end of the third sentence, rather than one ref for each sentence. This is also in line with the sourcing style. See WP:WHENNOTCITE ("Per WP:PAIC, citations should be placed at the end of the passage that they support. If one source alone supports consecutive sentences in the same paragraph, one citation of it at the end of the final sentence is sufficient. It is not necessary to include a citation for each individual consecutive sentence, as this is overkill."). To be safe one could repeat the source (if you insist I can do it) but I'd like to point out that it is not required, and can actually be distracting. Some of the sentences that I tackled were crazy long to start with. This makes them hard to read for those who don't have a university education or are not native English speakers. Please put yourself into their shoes. That's what I am trying to do.

I've completed my quick "once over" for readability improvements now. According to the Wikipedia readability tool (accessible from the tool bar on the right), the score for Readability (Flesch) is now 34.08 compared to only 22.53 for the 16 January version before I started (this is actually a higher improvement than I would have expected, after only 2-3 hours of editing). So I think it was generally a worthwhile exercise. EMsmile (talk) 23:03, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Blindly applying WP:WHENNOTCITE allows all future editors to inject content between exploded sentences, so that the original sentence's content is split and some will appear unsourced. Separately, original (longer) sentences join related ideas together with commas, hyphens, etc. However, breaking into separate sentences, separated by ".", makes the ideas disjointed--something a machine-based readability tool cannot comprehend or account for. "Progressive" is objectively descriptive, and not judgmental. —RCraig09 (talk) 05:26, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

I didn't "blindly apply" WP:WHENNOTCITE, I followed that guideline because I think it makes a lot of sense here. If other editors want to interject other content in future, they would have to add the references accordingly. This does not speak against usage of the guideline.

To me it seems that you are doing WP:OWN here and don't like that I've copy edited this article for readability improvements. You wrote 77% of the article so it's understandable that you think it's perfect and needs no further work. This is not how collaborative editing on Wikipedia works.

I pointed out how the formal guideline (superscripts) compromises the substantive issue (verifiability). This is another example of your valuing the formal over the substantive.

Now you're psychoanalyzing, telling me what I think. Look in the mirror: ownership issues arise when one editor's subjective opinions and formal preferences are imposed, either in articles or on Talk Pages. The "Formal>substantive" issue is just one example.

Is "progressive organisation" a neutral term?

(moved from above, this referring to this edit by RCraig09)

Also, the term "progressive organization" is ill-defined. What is your definition of "progressive"? Something that is left-leaning/liberal? If you want to use this term because the source used it then it should be put into quotation marks to indicate that it was their wording, not our judgement. This is referring to this edit. The sentence works equally well without "progressive organizations". EMsmile (talk) 21:38, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

I still don't know what your definition of "progressive" is here (there is no Wikipedia article on progressive organization either) and why you insist that it needs to be in the article. If it needs to stay there then it needs quotation marks to show that it's the wording that the source used! What one person calls "progressive" could be called "backward" by another person. It's subjective EMsmile (talk) 11:18, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

It is 5,000,000% irrelevant what my definition of "progressive" is. It is a commonly used word. You're making someone else look up a word for you: see progressive adjective definition 3. The term is well defined. Especially in the context of the Grist reference—which gives explicit examples of progressive organizations that are included in this article—the term is well understood. The word is used in its normal manner, and doesn't require quotes any more than "environmental" or any other word from the reference. —RCraig09 (talk) 17:10, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

I disagree with you and a quick google search for the question "what is a progressive organisation?" or "is the term "progressive organization" subjective?" brings up relevant results. For example here: "The term "progressive" encompasses a wide range of viewpoints, and it is therefore difficult to pin down an exact definition of what a progressive organization might be." Chat-GPT explains it like this: "The term "progressive organization" can be subjective. The subjective nature arises from the fact that what is considered "progressive" can vary based on individual perspectives, cultural contexts, and political ideologies. Furthermore, what is considered progressive in one context or society may not be seen as such in another." - Anyway, not worth arguing further about it any further. Perhaps we can get a third opinion by someone or the WP:GOCE people that I2K has requested will pick it up. EMsmile (talk) 13:32, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

Of course, most words in the dictionary have multiple meanings. ("Environmental" has multiple meanings; should we remove it or place it in quotes?) "Multiple meanings" is no reason to exclude progressive from Wikipedia articles, or place quotes around it when, as here, it's used in the source in its ordinary way. Have you seen any other Wikipedia article that placed "progressive" in quotes? —RCraig09 (talk) 17:01, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

Paragraph about Finnish newspaper font

I propose to either delete this paragraph or to move it to "Society and culture > Trivia". In my opinion it is not WP:DUE and does not relate to the core topic of this article (the usage of the term) but just about a font type that happens to be called climate crisis: In 2021, Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat created a free variable font called "Climate Crisis" having eight different weights that correlate with Arctic sea ice decline, visualizing how ice melt has changed over the decades. The newspaper's art director posited that the font both evokes the aesthetics of environmentalism and inherently constitutes a data visualization graphic. EMsmile (talk) 22:06, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

The font design is relevant to the term climate change climate crisis. It shows the wide extent of usage of the term beyond science, news, etc. It is not trivial, and is arguably a form of data visualization. — 05:26, 29 February 2024 (UTC) Fixed at —RCraig09 (talk) 19:14, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

OK. EMsmile (talk) 11:32, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Hard to understand sentences

Here are some hard to understand sentences which I think we need to simplify:
A. In September 2019, Bloomberg journalist Emma Vickers posited that crisis terminology—though the issue was one, literally, of semantics—may be "showing results", citing a 2019 poll by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation saying that 38% of U.S. adults termed climate change "a crisis" while an equal number called it "a major problem but not a crisis". Difficult words: "posited" (why not just "stated"); I don't understand this (sorry I am not a native speaker): "though the issue was one, literally, of semantics".

Update: This has now already been simplified by User:Chidgk1 in this edit. Thanks.EMsmile (talk) 11:16, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

B. Another example that I find hard to understand, very academic language here: Others have written that, whether "appeals to fear generate a sustained and constructive engagement" is clearly a highly complex issue but that the answer is "usually not", with psychologists noting that humans' responses to danger (fight, flight, or freeze) can be maladaptive. EMsmile (talk) 22:31, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
C. Another example which I don't understand: the characterization spreading from "the ironized hellscape of the internet" to books and film. Any edits to make this clearer would be appreciated. EMsmile (talk) 22:44, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
D. I also don't understand this with the corresponding response among Republicans tripling. Overall, I think the section on "Psychological and neuroscientific studies" goes into too much depth on one small study (primary source) with just 120 participants and in the U.S. Also it doesn't come out clearly why there was a not to split the group along party lines. In any case, I think the sample size would be too small to draw conclusions about how the responses to the term differ by party. And it's U.S. centric. So I think it should be condensed. EMsmile (talk) 22:52, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Also, I don't think we need to mention the names of each and every journalist who has written about something. Can't we just make the statement and cite the source and if people want to see which journalist wrote it and where they can just look it up? Unless the author is very notable. EMsmile (talk) 22:18, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Obviously you have much more time than other editors. Much of what you do on this website is entirely subjective, which places a burden on other editors to spend their time reviewing dozens of your edits, per article. Verbose Talk Page posts add to the burden. ... Briefly: I mention specific individual sources to give context, whether it's to give the weight of notability, or, conversely, to warn the reader of the source's limited notability. As wide use of the term climate crisis is fairly young, some studies are limited in scope but this may change in time. —RCraig09 (talk) 05:26, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your kind words (not). Yes, I have more time than other editors. This is something that should be cherished, not criticised. I see no guidelines on Wikipedia that prohibit an editor from spending xxx amount of hours per day on Wikipedia. (you seem to have a lot of time on Wikipedia too, by the way) In general, I have been getting a lot of positive feedback for my work. The fact that you don't like my work (apparently) has been well established through various talk page discussions already and I just have to live with that. No need to revisit this each and every time that I edit an article that you feel strongly about. FYI, I've spent only 3 hours of my time to improve the readability of this article which I don't think is overly excessive.

If you don't have time to improve those difficult to understand sentences that I've mentioned above that's fine. I can try to do it in the next few days myself but I struggled with those sentences as I simply didn't understand them (chances are, I am not the only one). But there's no rush, we can improve them over time when someone has time.

As to mentioning the source explicitly each time, I think this is not necessary in all cases. Sometimes it's useful but not all the time. For the same reason, we are not meant to explicitly mention IPCC every time in those sentences where we use the IPCC report as a source. I.e. not "The IPCC says that" but just state the fact and then add IPCC as the source. I guess newspaper articles and blog posts are weaker sources than IPCC and may contain more opinions than facts so perhaps it's different. EMsmile (talk) 11:26, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

The issue is making other editors spend their time (e.g., with numerous verbose essays); that is not to be cherished. Please don't occupy any more of other people's time by responding to this post. —RCraig09 (talk) 17:18, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

I am extremely disappointed by the clearly hostile tone this discussion has taken, likely crossing the line into violating WP:NPA at times. I opted to request assistance from GOCE for this article, as I hope that their intervention will prove definitive. There are far too many other things that still need to be done that are altogether more important than this, so I hope no part of this and the immediately preceding discussions will be revived in the meantime. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 10:51, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

Very disappointing indeed. And not the first time between me and that user. :-( Probably not the last time either. Anyhow, the article only gets around 100 pageviews per day so not worth losing too much sleep over. But it would be great if someone from the GOCE had time for improving this article. EMsmile (talk) 13:37, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

Summary: From EMsmile's DOZENS of edits and verbose posts here, "That user" made three (3) changes:

• "That user" inserted <ref /> footnote superscripts for the substantive reason of ensuring future insertions won't render sentences unsourced. EMsmile reverted, with apparently the only reasoning being that her application of the formal WP:WHENNOTCITE guideline "makes a lot of sense here".
• "That user" removed a grossly editorial and, by reliably sourced descriptions, factually wrong insertion of "perhaps 1.5°C".
• "That user" replaced specific and well understood language from a source including the commonly used word "progressive"--which EMsmile removed on the apparent reasoning that it is supposedly not "neutral" and has more than one definition.

For arguing re these three changes, she insinuates it is I who violate WP:OWN. "Very disappointing indeed."

Of course, bringing in general copy editors will attract people with even less knowledge of the subject, and when formal changes will compromise substantive content. —RCraig09 (talk) 17:05, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

I think the suggestion of I2K to bring in someone from WP:GOCE is actually spot on. This is a perfect article for an outsider to take a look at its readability as the article is not overly technical and should be rather easy to improve. I look forward to their contributions. EMsmile (talk) 11:14, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Reply to 22:18, 28 Feb post:
A. "Said" is like claimed and is therefore stronger than posited (synonyms=postulated, proposed). But at this point I won't argue.
B. I removed/rearranged some language to simplify.
C. The language "ironized hellscape of the internet" is unique, to show how the term's usage (important here) has spread. The language contrasts scrappy social media with more respected mainstream "books and film". The language can't be adequately replaced by Wikipedia editors' rephrasing, and now includes three links to Wiktionary to clarify.
D. Though it's really not clearer, I changed the simpler "tripling" to "increasing by 200%".
—RCraig09 (talk) 05:47, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

I am not planning to get deeply involved in this again (and certainly want to keep it light hearted) so just very briefly about those sentences that I had identified as difficult in my post on 28 Feb 24:

A. "Said" is neutral (in my opinion), and an easier word for non-native speakers than "posited". "Stated that" would also work.

B. New wording of that sentence is now: "Researchers have written that "appeals to fear" usually do not generate "sustained and constructive engagement", noting how psychologists consider humans' responses to danger (fight, flight, or freeze) can be maladaptive if they do not reduce the danger". For sure better then before but I would still prefer to break this into 2 sentences. Also wondering if we really need "maladaptive" here or if a simpler word wouldn't work better. - Not feeling strongly about this though.

Still about B.: Oh and Chat-GPT made this proposal for a simplified version of the sentence: "Researchers have stated that "using fear to persuade" typically fails to foster "long-term and positive involvement," highlighting psychologists' view that human reactions to danger (fight, flight, or freeze) might not be helpful if they don't mitigate the danger." (I know you don't like chat-GPT. I am putting it here for inspiration only; note how the language model did not use "maladaptive" but "might not be helpful").

C. I still don't understand it and don't think that wiktionary links are a great way but never mind. The wording "ironized hellscape of the internet" might be insider knowledge for American readers, that's fine.

D. I've proposed different wording and put this in the edit summary: trying again to make this clearer (200% is no better than "tripled" was). The sentence in the news article was just "Among Democrats, the study found a 60% greater emotional response to the term "climate crisis" than to "climate change," and a tripling in emotional response among Republicans.". I would actually prefer to delete this - overly detailed and unexplained. - Not feeling strongly about it though. EMsmile (talk) 23:41, 18 March 2024 (UTC)