User:Femke/CC renaming discussion

Femke Nijsse (talk) 14:49, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Resolving the naming issue of climate change and global warming

I'm planning to copy this introduction, the FAQ and the template for discussion on the climate change page with a notification at our WikiProject and global warming page

Currently, our global warming article deals with current global climate change, while our climate change article deals with climatic changes in general. Over the last couple of months, a few calls to rediscuss this have been put forward, and here at last I'd like to start the discussion for real with a concrete set of proposals. I've prepared the overview arguments for why I believe the current situation is untenable and what policies and guidelines are applicable. I also put forward a solution to solve this issue. The main reason for not calling an article about general climate change, simply climate change is that most people associate it with current climate change. Applicable guideline: WP:PRIMARYTOPIC:

I think that the first criterion is mostly important here. In Q1.1 (specifically point 4) I've laid out evidence that the term climate change is only used to refer to climate change in general about 0.5 to 2% of the time, both in lay literature and in scientific literature. In previous discussion, we've focused on definitions of global warming and climate change to determine this distinction. I think that misses the point of PRIMARYTOPIC, as this disregards how the terms are actually used. Climate change and global warming are both used in common speech to refer to the current warming. I suspect that the readers of climate change, over a million per year, are mostly interested in what is typically meant by climate change and the hatnote is insufficient to lead all of them to our page about current climate change: global warming.

After we've decided on a proper title of this article, I'm planning on starting a discussion on the most accurate title for our global warming article. Some of the argumentation below is in reference to that.

Two possible ways forward and my argumentation for renaming

Considering the current practice leads to confusion (see entirety of Q1.1) and is at odds with Wikipedia guidelines, there are two courses of action for the current text at climate change that I consider to be in line with policy&guidelines:

1. Merge the page into other pages that deal with climate change in general (mostly climate system)
2. Rename the page. Criteria for good names are found under WP:CRITERIA.

My renaming proposal:

Credit for this proposal goes to User:Colin M.

Rename climate change to climatic changes. The plural here provides a natural disambiguation from current climate change.

1. Advantage 1: the scope can be completely retained.
2. Advantage 2: we stop confusion (I think). There are two types of confusion that can happen due to an article title. One is with internal links breaking, and the other one with typing climate into search box and getting the wrong page. I'd say the former is worst, in the sense that people believe their on the right page
   1. Climatic changes is currently a redirect with only 1 link. So wrong internal links are set to not become a big problem here.
   2. By making the page into climatic changes, there is an 'early' point where people that search climate change break off.

Alternative names

Other possible names that I came up with, that I think fall short of meeting title criteria.

1. Attempts at finding synonym for climate change which is not primarily associated with current climate change: Climate variation, Climatic fluctuation, Climatic variation. These terms are also used, informally, to describe climate variability: changes at faster time scales and are not precise.
2. Option that does restrict scope: Natural climate change (restricted scope). Although the term is immediately clear, it might lead people to think current climate change is natural.
3. Putting qualification after title, such as general: Climate change (general). It's not really clear what the world general means. It could for instance refer to the human, animal and physical aspects of climate change. Other option is climate change (past, present and future). Again unclear whether past only refers to last 200 years of further back.

Merging into other pages

Information has already been copied to our new climate system article (much of it was changed as it violated verifiability and summary style guidelines). About a third/half of that article is about climate change and it provides a basic overview. The new climate variability article also has a slight overlap.

Background information

Q1.1: How do we know the current naming leads to confusion?

A1.1: We have five clear indications the current naming practice leads to widespread confusion, and the hat note is insufficient to mitigate this confusion:

1. Look at Pages that link to climate change (Special:WhatLinksHere/Climate_change minus the navboxes). Only ~10% are linked correctly, with 90% of them referring to ongoing climate change!
2. Climate change is read disproportionately often for a page about the general theory of climate change. It's at 3000 views a day, compared to 1500 for the GA article on climate. Peaks in climate change readership often coincide with peaks in global warming, further suggesting people are actually looking for information about current warming (Comparison of last year's viewership)
3. A large portion of comments and edits on climate change from new and older editors is about current climate change.
4. Our climate change article is the odd one out in Google's search engine. Only on the 4th page of unbiased Google results is there another page about climate change in general, instead of current warming. For Google scholar (possibly biased towards my search history), the first mention of non-current climate change was on page 6. With a bit of rough statistics, this implies that climate change refers to the ongoing climate change about 97-99.5% of the time.
5. There have been complaints and debates on the talk pages for years, and the number and passion of these has increased the last two years.

Q1.2: Why was the distinction established

A1.2: Multiple reasons were given to make the distinction as it is now (it started in April 2002. See Talk:Global warming/Archive 1):

1. First of all, back around 2005 global warming was the most-used term to refer to current warming on Google. In books and in the UK parliament the switch to climate change came earlier.
2. The editors active then asserted that while the distinction climate change/global warming was not made properly by lay people, scientists typically used climate change in the general sense, while global warming was used only to refer to current warming (see for instance the first few edits 1, 2 of the climate change article). While there may have been some truth in it in the past, this is certainly not the case anymore now, as can be seen by the names of the most prominent climate research sources (IPCC and National Climate Assessment) and a comparison of Google Scholar's results.
3. In a recent discussion, it was proposed that renaming the global warming article into climate change would play into the hands of those that want to downplay the human role in the current warming. Note that the article title policy explicitly states that "In discussing the appropriate title of an article, remember that the choice of title is not dependent on whether a name is "right" in a moral or political sense".

Q1.3: What has changed since previous discussions?

A1.3: Common usage of the terms has changed, as well as the context on Wikipedia:

1. The usage of the terminology global warming and climate change has shifted. Google keeps track of the frequency of use for both terms and from about 2015 climate change has become the more dominant term for the current warming+effects. In books and in the UK parliament the switch to climate change came earlier.
2. We've made a new article: climate system that covers the basics of the general concept of climate change, so that a separate article is not needed as much as before.
3. Starting with Talk:Global warming/Archive 1, the first three archives have been rebuilt and formatted with dates and threading to extent possible. It is much easier now to see the denial/skeptic arguments that led to the dubious bifurcation we have inherited.

Discussion and surveying of opinions

My proposal is to rename climate change to climatic changes. The current name leads to a lot of confusion. Climate change will become a redirect to global warming (which is the guideline when we determine the primary topic of climate change is current climate change).

Survey (not voting)

In this section, please say "Support", "Opposed", or propose a different article title, but remember this is a guide, not a binding vote. If you don't agree with the premise of this renaming proposal (climate change has current climate change as primary topic) explicitly state this as well.

1. .. (example: Support climate change should point towards global warming & Support climatic changes as new title. ~~~~)
2. ...
3. ...

Discussion

In this section, please explain your answers above, referencing reliable sources and policies and guidelines, specifically WP:PRIMARYTOPIC and WP:ARTICLETITLE. Beware of making irrelevant arguments like these.

1. ...
2. ...
3. ...

---

Streamlined plan

As my previous plan was a bit too difficult procedurally, I have simplified it a bit. We first have the discussion of a renaming climate change and then the discussion of a possible renaming of global warming.

First rename climate change

Step 1: Fix the confusing name of the climate change article

This plan entails renaming climate change to climate variability and change. The current name leads to a lot of confusing. The boundary between variability and change is quite subjective. This captures the scope of the article better as well. The climate change page will a redirect to global warming. Survey (not voting) In this section, please say "Support", "Opposed" etc, but remember this is a guide, not a binding vote Discussion In this section, please explain your answers above, referencing WP:RS and WP:P&G. Beware of making irrelevant arguments like these.

Then start renaming of global warming

Step 2: Discuss whether global warming should be renamed

This step corresponds to phase 2a below. The discussion will take place in two rounds. First, there will be a public consultation round on what the exact question is going exactly and then we discuss a possible new name for our article. If we decide on climate change is going to be the name of the new article, it stops being a disambiguation page. Survey (not voting) Discussion In this section, please explain your answers above, using citations to WP:RS and WP:P&G. Beware of making irrelevant arguments like these.

More complicated old plan

Discussion and survey to assess consensus: Phase 1

Phase 1: Should "global warming" and "climate change" point to the same page?

Survey (not voting) In this section, please say "Support", "Opposed" etc, but remember this is a guide, not a binding vote Support NightHeron (talk) 18:57, 29 September 2019 (UTC) Support Common usage has (unfortunately) conflated the two terms; WP must follow. —RCraig09 (talk) 22:35, 7 October 2019 (UTC) Discussion In this section, please explain your answers above, using citations to WP:RS and WP:P&G. Beware of making irrelevant arguments like these. I haven't not-voted yet. My original belief was that climate change should go to a disambig page from which one could easily get to the content that is now at global warming, but under a new article name Human-caused global warming and climate change. That still has appeal to me but I have not carefully thought through Femke's alternative proposals NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 18:48, 29 September 2019 (UTC) It seems that the public perceives the two terms to be synonymous, with "global warming" being gradually supplanted by "climate change" in most RS. We should be sensitive to public perceptions. In particular, as I've discussed elsewhere, I think a retitled Global warming article needs to be reorganized so as to frontload (into the lead and early sections) the examples and aspects that are easiest to understand and most striking to a reader, and postpone technical content to the later sections, which the average reader will not be likely to read.NightHeron (talk) 19:06, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

Discussion and survey to assess consensus: Phase 2a

Phase 2a: what should be the title of the article

I'd like to discuss a broad set of options for the article name: Global warming Climate change Global warming and climate change. Current climate change Global climate change Climate crisis Human-caused global warming and climate change Please keep in mind that there are more than two options available. Many of us might have a single favourite option, but please also consider the merits of other options and consider voting (weakly) positive for more than one option. Survey (not voting) (| Weak support) User Global warming Climate change Global warming and climate change Global climate change Climate crisis Human-caused global warming and climate change Femke Nijsse (talk) 13:41, 5 September 2019 (UTC) Support Strongly Support Support Strongly Support  Strongly oppose  Weakly oppose NightHeron (talk) 18:41, 29 September 2019 (UTC)  Oppose Strongly Support  Oppose Support  Strongly Oppose  Oppose NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 19:09, 29 September 2019 (UTC)  Oppose  Oppose  Oppose  Oppose RCraig09 (talk) 19:45, 7 October 2019 (UTC)  Oppose  Oppose Strongly support  Oppose  Oppose Support ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... Insert table here with three options per proposed name: support, consent, oppose Discussion Reason for opposing "global warming": it leads to confusion because of the discrepancy between the scientific meaning of the term to refer to a complicated phenomenon and the popular meaning, which is much more simplistic. The term plays into the hands of denialists who say foolish things such as "Montana is getting huge amounts of snow in September. There's no global warming." Reason for opposing "current climate change": it's been going on for a long time, more or less since industrialization (and there are instances of regional human-caused climate change much earlier), and scientists have been writing a lot about it for many years. NightHeron (talk) 18:54, 29 September 2019 (UTC) Strongly oppose "climate crisis" per WP:NPOV because it's a controversial framing; oppose the last option because it's too long, although "Human-caused climate change" would be okay. NightHeron (talk) 13:45, 1 October 2019 (UTC) Human-caused global warming and climate change; The status quo isn't working. Neither "Global warming" nor "climate change" nor "global warming and climate chagne" are tied to time and all of those naked concepts have existed at other times and will in the far off futre. "Global climate change" is in the pro lit but really rare in lay use. And I shudder at the word "Current" because we had that in the first sentence of Global Warming during the fracas over the notional hiatus (that ended up not existing) but we sure had to deal wiht a shit storm when for awhile the signal seemed to be saying it was not currently warming, as in not this instant. But saying HUMAN-CAUSED clearly injects both a time and causation message that makes it very specific but immune to wiggles in the temperature record. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 19:08, 29 September 2019 (UTC) The two commonly conflated terms (and presumably, the most commonly searched terms) are GW and CC separately, so the most concise way to describe the substantive topic is to join the two terms to form "Global warming and climate change". Adding "Anthropogenic..." or "Human-caused..." is ~acceptable to me, but adding an unnecessary adjective phrase may violate wp:concise and may sound wp:promotional. "Current" climate change is vague, and "global" climate change adds no useful meaning to "CC" by itself. Maybe in ten or twenty years, "Climate crisis" will be the most-used term and we'll have to rename/move the article. —RCraig09 (talk) 20:07, 7 October 2019 (UTC) Random comment???? Needs a section heading or something Some people argue that climate crisis is the appropriate term here. I'd argue that this would go against our neutrality principles for Wikipedia articles, and would like to exclude it from the discussion. Feel free to add any other possibilities here if needed. Strongly agree about excluding "climate crisis". NightHeron (talk) 18:54, 29 September 2019 (UTC) Strongly DISAGREE about maneuvering to cut off the opportunity for debate. I will probably oppose it, but we're just asking for grief if the door appears to be artificially closed before anyone steps into the arena. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 19:08, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

Discussion and survey to assess consensus: Phase 2b

Phase 2b: what should happen to the content of climate change

My proposal is that we rename climate change into climate variability and change. This means the scope of the article remains largely the same, but shifts a bit towards faster modes of variability. In popular literature (f.i. Aussie government) the question is often asked what climate variability is and how it differs from climate change. I think this article will not have many viewers, which will stop skeptics from commenting. I also think this will fill the gap that we don't have an article about climate variability, which is a central theme in climate research. Insert table here with three options per proposed scope: support, consent, oppose

Strongly opposed [to natural climate change, previous proposal, (added by Femke)] Femke, you're thinking like a thinking scientist. Try putting yourself in the shoes of a strudel chef, and imagine what linguist George Lakoff would say about frequent exposure to the three word phrase Natural-Climate-Change..... I think repetition of that three word phrase servs the goals of the climate denial machine. I know that's not what you intend, but that's what I fear would result. In addition, at the talk page today we regularly have people upset because they didn't read and don't understand the hatnote that says the info they want is at global warming. Its a weary drumbeat of these posts. If we went with "natural climate change" we would have the same basic thing happening, plus there would be the poeple who didn't read but wanted to scream at us that AGW is human caused. I know you have done a lot of recent work there, and I have not reviewed it to reconsider my earlier opinion that we should reduce climtae change to a disambig page. But I will get around to that after we, um, resolve the crisis you might say. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 19:16, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

I think you might be (at least partially) right here. I'd like to find a name for the article that works good with Google: people interested in general climate change must be able to find it and other shouldn't. My new name does not have climate change next to each other, meaning that people will not get served this title by Google wrongly as much. Both in scientific literature and in lay literature, the term climate variability is used a lot and that's why I'm proposing to rename it to climate variability and change. This captures the current scope well, and is sufficiently technical that people don't reach that page unless they're actually interested in climate variability. In part I of the plan, I've now put that climate change can become a disambig page (or direct redirect). I still think climate change might be the best name for our global warming article, but we only have to decide on that in part 2 of the plan. Having climate change being a disambig page, even if it is temporary, will trigger a lot of people into fixing their links, as bots and many users actively sniff them out.

My insistence that we need to have an article about climate variability the following. On Google Scholar, the term climate variability has 3/4 million articles! In that sense it is completely ridiculous that we don't have an article about this yet. As we discussed before, there is a grey area between climate variability and (general) climate change, so it makes most sense to discuss them together. Femke Nijsse (talk) 19:44, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

Background

QNaN: Is there a political/social dimension to the choice of article name?

ANaN: In previous discussion it was asserted that requests for name changes pop up more regularly during the presidential election cycle in the USA. It was furthermore stated that some strategist from the republican party of the USA had pushed for the term climate change over global warming because he deemed this less scary. I think getting politics involved is not fruitful here, but it's important to have the facts all collected, so that we can move on.

There is extensive research of the consequences of using certain terms to describe climate change.

1. There is evidence US republicans believe in climate change more if the term climate change is used over global warming.
2. On average in the EU and US, people considered the problem to be equally serious independent of the term used. Within US partisan groups, republicans were more concerned about climate change, whereas Democrats were more concerned about global warming.
3. It's true that this US Republican strategist advocated climate change over global warming because he thought it would sound less scary. This doesn't seem true in the research over the last 10 years, so let's completely disregard the framing of this single party in a single country.

QNaN: (Phase 2b) Where will information about the general concept op climate change be put if not in climate change?

ANaN: Broadly speaking, there are two options (surveying in phase 2). The general concept of climate change is discussed in the new article of climate system.

1. We rescope the climate change article to only talk about natural CC (potential names natural climate change or natural climate variability
2. We can choose to rename the current climate change article into something like general theory of climate changes (probably needs a better title).

references

QNaN: What needs to be done?

ANaN: This depends on what solution we opt for.

1. If we keep old distinction
   1. Tidy up all the wrong links to climate change
   2. Tidy up categorization
2. If we decide to merge climate change and global warming (keeping the latter text almost completely, and deleting most of climate change)
   1. We need to fix links to climate change first. (This needs doing MORE if we don't change as most of the links seem wrong indeed)
   2. THEN do the move(s) to the new article name. If we move GW, we need an admin.
   3. We need to identify which templates link to climate change and edit those
   4. We MIGHT want to reconsider the categorization. This is a mess, so again the work load does probably not increase.
3. If we chose to keep the article climate change under a different name
   1. Tidy up all the wrong links to climate change
   2. Tidy up categorization

For tidying up the internal links, there are fortunately some tools at our disposal. The answer I got at the helpdesk:

There are only 25 redirects to climate change so I'm guessing you're talking about incoming links. There are ~5.000 articles that link to climate change, so what I'd do is this: Make an API search query like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=search&srsearch=insource:/\[\[climate%20change(\||\])/i&utf8=&srlimit=10, export it to Excel, read the matching text snippets and mark in a new column if it is about global warming or climate variability, then take the list of articles that need to be changed and use WP:JWB to rapidly update the links. If you make a list of keywords that make an article more likely to be about either topic (like "Kyoto" vs. "Phanerozoic"), you could speed up your categorization. – Thjarkur (talk) 19:44, 4 October 2019 (UTC)

My old proposal that didn't garner much support.

To rename climate change to new title Climate variability and change and change the scope of the article slightly, covering the constrasting definitions and more examples of long-time variability. My reasoning:

1. When climate change is defined generally, the two terms have overlapping definitions, with variability often defined as changes on time scales of months to millennia, and climate change refers to changes on decades to millions of years.
2. Considering the overlap in definitions, two separate articles will unnecessary duplicate information
3. There is currently no article about climate variability, which is a grave omission. Information is scattered in climate oscillation and climate pattern and more.
4. While information will be duplicated from climate system, a separate article allows us to delve deeper into the topic. Furthermore, for many people that want information about climate variability and change, climate system is not the page they would look for initially.
5. The two terms are often used together and contrasted. Sometimes referring to recent CC, sometimes referring to CC in general. Examples in scientific literature ([1], [2], but [3]), books ([4], [5]) and information websites for lay people ([6], [7], [8])
6. The title will conform well with the Recognizability, Precision, Conciseness, Consistency title WP:CRITERIA, and reasonable well with naturalness (The title is one that readers are likely to look or search for and that editors would naturally use to link to the article from other articles. Such a title usually conveys what the subject is actually called in English..

Policy if we want to move page, but we don't agree on where

Q2.1: What if we agree on the fact that current title is wrong, but don't agree on what to next?

A2.1: My expectation and hope is that we'll definitely agree on the fact that the title climate change should not refer to this article. I have been mulling over a better title and/or a rescope of the current article and, while I think my proposal is good, I don't think it's perfect. I can imagine we don't come to a perfect consensus on what to do next. Per WP:NOGOODOPTIONS, note that But then again, there are rare circumstances where multiple names have been proposed and no consensus arises out of any, except that it is determined that the current title should not host the article. (There are good arguments for Y, and there are good arguments for Z, but there are virtually no good arguments for it to stay at X.) In these difficult circumstances, the closer should pick the best title of the options available, and then be clear that while consensus has rejected the former title (and no request to bring it back should be made lightly), there is no consensus for the title actually chosen. And if anyone objects to the closer's choice, then instead of taking it to move review, they should simply make another move request at any time, which will hopefully lead the article to its final resting place.

Q1.5: What is the definition of climate variability?

A1.5: Multiple reliable sources give definitions of these terms that correspond to our article's scope. While most definitions of climate variability include both (general) climate change and changes on shorter time scales, many uses of the term climate variability in the scientific literature are about changes of maximally a few millennia. (e.g. [9][10][11]

1. The IPCC in SR15 glossary says: Climate variability refers to variations in the mean state and other statistics (such as standard deviations, the occurrence of extremes, etc.) of the climate on all spatial and temporal scales beyond that of individual weather events. Variability may be due to natural internal processes within the climate system (internal variability), or to variations in natural or anthropogenic external forcing (external variability). See also Climate change
2. The WMO says: Climate Variability is defined as variations in the mean state and other statistics of the climate on all temporal and spatial scales, beyond individual weather events. The term "Climate Variability" is often used to denote deviations of climatic statistics over a given period of time (e.g. a month, season or year) when compared to long-term statistics for the same calendar period. Climate variability is measured by these deviations, which are usually termed anomalies. Variability may be due to natural internal processes within the climate system (internal variability), or to variations in natural or anthropogenic external factors (external variability)

Q1.4: What do the reliable sources say about the terminology for current global warming/climate change?

A1.4: User:dave souza has made a splendid overview of sources as a resource for editing the lede of global warming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Global_warming/Archive_75#Sources:_global_warming_definitions,_relation_to_climate_change. A summary:

1. Most modern scientific sources now use climate change to refer to current period.
2. A distinction is made, often after stating that the terms are often used interchangeably, that climate change is more encompassing that global warming, also including changes in circulation and the hydrological cycle as a consequence of high GHG concentrations.
3. Climate change and global warming are BOTH sporadically used to refer to historical periods of climate change/warming, but climate change a bit more often.

The plan(s) itself

Q3.1: The description of Plan A (the Nijsse plan): having climate change being a redirect to (or name of) of our FA article

A3.1: Plan A involves moving and a slight rescoping of the text of climate change to climate variability and change, and then making climate change itself a redirect to our chosen article name (Step 1).

advantages

• Confusion as described above would go away
• Best application of WP:COMMONNAME and WP:PRIMARYTOPIC

disadvantage

• In making new internal links, a small percentage (say 1%?) of people might erroneously point towards current climate change, while referring to the general concept.

Q3.2: The description of Plan B (the NEAG plan): deleting the climate change article content and making climate change a disambiguation page to climate system#External forcings (?) and global warming.

A3.2:

advantages

• Editors will always have to make a conscious decision to which article to point.

disadvantage

• Possibly at odds with WP:PRIMARYTOPIC which states A topic is primary for a term with respect to usage if it is highly likely—much more likely than any other single topic, and more likely than all the other topics combined—to be the topic sought when a reader searches for that term. in combination with and WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT which states that, The fact that an article has a different title is not a factor in determining whether a topic is primary

For climate change Wikiproject featured

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