Talk:Climate change in Asia

Use standard structure?
Nice work, User:InformationToKnowledge, thanks! My recommendation would be to use the standard section headings and ordering that we have developed for this suite of articles ("climate change in country X"). You can find the standard section headings here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Climate_change/Style_guide#Outline_for_articles_about_specific_countries_or_geographies EMsmile (talk) 08:23, 8 May 2024 (UTC)


 * But...this is a continent, not a country! More to the point, I have created this by following the corresponding chapter of AR6 practically line-by-line. I don't think it would fit neatly into that structure.
 * Furthermore, perhaps I have not looked at the other country-scale level articles closely enough, but this proposed structure seems inherently flawed to me. Frankly, I don't think it makes any sense whatsoever to treat "Temperature and weather changes...such as bushfires, heat waves, droughts" and Sea level rise as simply "Impacts on the natural environment", somehow separate from "Impacts on people" - not when they are literally the cause of nearly all the damage to the economy, "Agriculture and food production", "Infrastructure", "Tourism", etc.
 * I looked at a handful of country-level articles, and I still don't think it actually works well, even when people actually try to fill all of the points. Maybe you can show me examples where you think it's successful, but I am really skeptical. It doesn't help that somehow, all of those articles have ended up with that pair of Koppen-Geiger maps, which are always so stupidly blown up that they literally break the screen layout every time. Not to mention that they break the cardinal rule by describing (relatively) impacts as a certainty rather than a possibility - especially when they are all based on the worst climate change scenario, yet never seem to have a caption acknowledging that. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 11:47, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
 * yes, it's a continent, not a country but that doesn't matter for these purposes. I think it helps when the CCC articles follow the same structure; it makes it easier for our readers. It took us a while to derive at that structure. There are of course other ways of doing it but I think this structure works fairly well. The AR6 report also distinguishes between impacts on the natural environment versus impacts on people. To me that is a logical split. You could have impacts on the natural environment even after a time when perhaps all humans are wiped off the planet. And yes, of course there is overlap between the two sections but it's still one possible, logical way of splitting it.
 * Other points:
 * I don't feel strongly about those Koppen-Geiger maps, someone else had added those before my time. Their formatting and caption could easily be adjusted.
 * I can't remember off-hand which of the 50 or so country climate change articles we have are the best ones to showcase, I would have to click around and check.
 * I think if you want to propose a different structure, this should be discussed at a central place. You can see the previous discussion here. Or you could start a discussion on the talk page of WikiProject Climate Change (my other link is the talk page of the style guide which gets fewer visitors).
 * Keep in mind that if you are serious about changing the structure it would ideally mean changing it for all the 50 or so articles (about two years ago, I worked hard on bringing them all into the agreed structure).
 * Some changes are so minor that I don't think it's worth arguing about, e.g. we decided to have GHG emissions first, not last. Also we had mitigation separate from GHGE. Also I would not repeat "climate change" in the section title for adaptation.
 * Pinging User:Chidgk1 as I think he has also worked on these country articles in the past or followed that previous discussion about a possible standard structure. EMsmile (talk) 13:53, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I have made some small changes now. That's pretty much all that is needed to make it sufficiently close to the standard structure, I think. Personally, I would split off the last section that is about agriculture and society into a main level heading called "impacts on people" but don't feel sufficiently strongly about it. The section on sea water rise is a mixture of impacts on natural environment and impacts on people; this is probably unavoidable. EMsmile (talk) 14:00, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
 * P.S. Maybe my comment above made it sound like I was asking for a big restructuring. Really it was just a few tweaks, that's it. I am not that fussed about the sub-heading levels but I think it would be good if the main level headings are the same across all articles and also in the same order, i.e. GHG emissions first, then impacts, then mitigation and adaptation towards the end. EMsmile (talk) 14:08, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Right, I don't really object to the general order of the sections. My point was that AR6 specifically describes warming, heatwaves, rainfall anomalies, etc. in the context of how they affect people. Its sections on the natural environment are about ecosystem disruption, species migrations or extinctions, etc. which is how I have structured this too, and I think this is what all our articles should adopt. I'll wait a bit before making a centralized proposal, though.
 * And if anyone else would be interested in going through and altering the Koppen-Geiger map captions, I would dearly appreciate it. I have now edited the article to show how I would like to caption these graphics. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 17:28, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Hi, but you are referring to AR6 WG 2, right? That one is mostly about ecosystems and people. Whereas the WG 1 report is not so focused on people. Their chapters 8-11 is a bit what I would call "impacts on the natural environment" - I guess they don't call it impacts but changes: Chapter 8 Water Cycle Changes, Chapter 9 Ocean, Cryosphere and Sea Level Change, Chapter 10 Linking Global to Regional Climate Change, Chapter 11 Weather and Climate Extreme Events in a Changing Climate.
 * So when the impacts section of one of our "climate change in country X" (CCC) article is very long, then I think it does make sense to split it into two, like we had proposed in the standard structure style guide here. If it's not overly long then we could leave it all in one main heading (like it is now for climate change in Asia). And I agree that the separation can be somewhat arbitrary and for "sea level rise" it's particularly tricky (it could equally be in both types of impacts/changes). EMsmile (talk) 08:05, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
 * And I agree with your suggestion of altering the Koppen-Geiger map captions. Would be good for someone to do that. I am not volunteering myself. Those CCC articles are important but have low pageviews so far. I worked on them a lot about two years ago and am giving myself a break from them. ;-) Would be great if the CCC articles would be tackled by students more in their assignments... EMsmile (talk) 08:05, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Well, AR6 has its continent chapters in WG2, so it just makes sense for us to follow WG2 stucture, no? Though, either way, detailed discussion of this structure is probably best left for the WikiProject.
 * And I suspect the CCC articles are not wikilinked very well - they generally seem barely perceptible on their own country pages, and probably missing from a fair number of articles where a link/excerpt would be relevant. Though, it probably only makes sense to link/excerpt them once they have been brought to a sufficient standard, which may require agreeing on a better format as well. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 10:26, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes, let's discuss changes to the standard structure there (although from experience, not much input is given from others). I find it interesting to ponder over a section on "changes" versus a section on "impacts". It think WG 1 talks about changes, WG 2 about impacts. So far, I had lumped that all together under impacts. Or maybe it's an academic discussion, I don't know.
 * And I agree about linking the CCC articles from the main country articles. I've done that in a few places and sometimes got pushback for it (most notably for the Bangladesh article, you can see it in the talk page archive from 3.5 years ago). I've also tried to encourage this on the WikiProjects Countries talk page. You can see a link to a previous discussion on the talk page of WikiProjects Countries here.
 * I would expect that a willingness by the "main country article page watchers" to allow addition of a bit of content on climate change is gradually increasing now.
 * And I think both things would ideally progress in parallel: better linking (in some cases with excerpts) from the main country articles, and improving the leads of the CCC articles at the same time. Would be a lovely project & initiative. One for which one could perhaps even apply for funding from some philanthropic entity for. EMsmile (talk) 11:11, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

By country section
I wonder if we could create a template that is similar to this one but only shows countries in Asia?:

I have no idea how to do this though. But it would be nifty to have, rather than long bullet point lists. EMsmile (talk) 10:24, 9 May 2024 (UTC)


 * I think it might be a good idea to first sort this template by continent, rather than present all the countries in a wall of hyperlinked text, even if it is alphabetical? I would do it myself already, but I suppose we still need consensus for this?
 * For that matter, Climate change in Europe & Climate change in the Middle East and North Africa use a list of excerpts rather than bullet points. I suppose there are probably just too many countries for this to work? It would be nice if we could still experiment with this in some way, though, and it would likely be more helpful than creating a sub-template. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 17:03, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
 * All good points. I have no clue how to go about editing that "world topic" template which looks like this . Grouping by continent could be useful but I don't know if it can be done. Maybe people would look for "their country" by alphabetical ordering anyhow and don't care about a continent substructure? Not sure. Or perhaps this world topic template is not meant for groups of articles that have so many countries.
 * Keep in mind that many of those articles listed in that template are actually not real stand-alone articles but are only redirects to certain sections. User:Clayoquot had suggested to delete those redirects (I see you have participated in that discussion). EMsmile (talk) 07:52, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
 * As to using excerpts or not, I am undecided. Perhaps just one or two excerpts per continent and only for those countries where the leads are good and worth excerpting? EMsmile (talk) 07:52, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I decided to just create a new template outright (Worldtopic apparently cannot be modified to the extent we would prefer), and I have started a WikiProject discussion about adopting it.
 * And I think it would be great if you could experiment with excerpts and see what would work the best. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 10:17, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Expanding the emissions section?
So, this article is primarily based on Chapter 10 of AR6 WG2, and so it is mainly focused on impacts and doesn't have much on emissions. In general, I prefer to work on impacts or even background theory, but I know that there are other editors who are more focused on emissions. I wonder if @Chidgk1 can find the time to work on this article, considering that it has a high pageview potential. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 15:21, 18 May 2024 (UTC)