Talk:Extinction risk from climate change/Archive 4

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 13 August 2020 and 25 November 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Summerdaw.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 21:00, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 8 September 2021 and 17 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Lindsaynandm13. Peer reviewers: Zoecollinss, Haleyferraris.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 21:00, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Please update with: "Avoiding ocean mass extinction from climate warming" and add missing info & projections summaries
Please add brief info about/from these two studies. They are currently featured in 2022 in science like so:

"scientists quantify global and local mass extinction risks of marine life from climate change and conservation potentials."

Right above this post, somebody expressed concern about the "Extinction Risks Reported sections" and I also think it's quite possible that the format of the section is inappropriate: it's a general problem of the article that top-level gross (what I mean is: mostly statistics and percentages) summary information is missing where the info currently in that section ordered chronologically could get integrated. Please move it out of the section and into sections structured by content, not by chronology.

The rest of this post-section mostly applies to the article Holocene extinction (where I haven't made a Talk post at least so far) more than to this article:

The content structure probably most due would be adding info about projections about fractions of types of animals at risk and projected effects. This could be structured for example by human taxonomy and/or by their effects and/or by severity and/or by the inhabited regions. I think this is neglected in the article Holocene extinction and only buried at the bottom of the #History section there.

I think it would be good, useful and important to integrate more knowledge about functional roles of threatened species as well as about the lack of knowledge about such (this also applies to any other projections) and the current state of science about potential chain-reaction effects etc.

Info from the two studies may also be useful at Reptile, IUCN Red List and Holocene extinction where you could add some brief info too if due.

In #See also or somewhere in the article a wikilink to List of recently extinct mammals could be due. It may also be a good idea to create a new list article for Timeline/List of animals recently declared extinct (cat).

This post-section is only relevant to this article:

If you ctrl+f articles like 2020 in science for "extinct" (search within the page) you may find some other notable relevant info. This may or may not be relevant here in some shape or form:

Scientists report that extensive coal burning and combustion of other organic matter in Siberia likely was a cause of Earth's most severe extinction event, the Permian-Triassic extinction event ~252 Mya. Scientists reconstruct the mechanisms, integrating them in a biogeochemical model, that led to the largest known extinction event, the Permian–Triassic extinction event 252 Mya, and report that it can be traced back to volcanic CO2 emissions. Some info about potential risks / mechanics of risks could also get added, for example another item: Scientists report that harmful algal blooms, which have been linked to deforestation, global warming and soil erosion, are proliferating in lakes and rivers around the globe. They add that such toxic algal blooms were a prominent feature of previous mass extinction events, in particular of the End-Permian Extinction.

Furthermore, a wikilink to Holocene extinction should be well-visible within the lead, this article really seems like a subarticle of that article (just like Effects of climate change on agriculture is a subarticle of Effects of climate change and merging them wouldn't be due).

Lastly, in the #See also the wikilink should be replaced with Global catastrophe scenarios (this is the current solution to the talk page post "Human extinction" further above).

I won't try to improve the article (or create the redlink article), please go ahead if you think this is useful, thanks.

Prototyperspective (talk) 22:21, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

Extinction Risks Reported sections
The Extinction Risks Reported sections listing all the dates from 2004-2020 is unnecessary and provides no true meaning. This article is to show examples of species and resources that are decreasing because of climate change. Having arbitrary dates that simply give an example of a year has no context to this article because information and events will change overtime. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Junkyard-dawg21 (talk • contribs) 21:48, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I agree with you Junkyard-dawg21. I don't really "get" the structure of this article. It should not be a chronological order but by type of plant or animal. EMsmile (talk) 22:16, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Why written like a timeline?
It was already mentioned above but why is this article written like a literature review and timeline of publications? I see you have continued with that style, User:InformationToKnowledge. Was that on purpose or was it because that was the structure that you found? I think this is not encyclopedic content in this format. We should cite reviews, not write them. EMsmile (talk) 22:25, 24 January 2023 (UTC)


 * I mean, you have already seen the earlier posts on this talk page. The timeline structure is absolutely the one I found: I have simply filled in the missing years, as that was easier to do than a full rewrite of the structure on top of updating it with new information.
 * At the same time, splitting the article into "by type of plant or animal" as you have proposed above is going to be very problematic, because the projections themselves aren't split quite as neatly. Perhaps we can separate the "all species" projections into a "general" section and the others into individual type sections, but then certain studies would have to be cited 3 or so times across the article. Worse, what are we to do when some of those projectins are explicitly about birds, or insects or amphibians - but the others are about generalized "vertebrates" and "invertebrates"?! Lastly, a couple of studies are about several different order extinctions in specific areas only, making it even more confusing.
 * I personally see only one other alternative, and that is to separate the material through a different kind of timeline - not by year of publication, but by year of projected impact. Something like: "Observed/Historical", "Ongoing-2050", "2050-70", "2070-2100 and beyond". That may work: I don't think anything else will. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 11:26, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Interesting. Yes, maybe the distinction "Observed/Historical", "Ongoing-2050", "2050-70", "2070-2100 and beyond" could work. But why would this article be so different to all the other climate change articles? Or can you think of any other examples that are set up in such a timeline manner? It reminds me a bit of an earlier discussion about Climate change degree by degree, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Climate_change/Archive_2#Climate_change_degree_by_degree . Also what about my earlier questions about overlap with Effects of climate change on terrestrial animals? (edit: I see now that you have addressed that in the section above) EMsmile (talk) 12:12, 25 January 2023 (UTC)


 * This article now is unlike any non-list article I've ever seen—massive amounts of technical detail that will blast away 99% of readers of this general-population encyclopedia. Read WP:ONEDOWN. This ~literature review is the verbose antithesis of information-to-knowledge conversion. Verbiage should be cut by two-thirds and organized according to topics that are meaningful to lay readers (without editor wp:synthesis, of course) .— RCraig09 (talk) 20:39, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I agree with RCraig09 on this. By the way, do you have time to help me at bioenergy and biomass (energy)? We have a similar problem there where excessive amount of details about climate neutrality aspects has accumulated there over the years (or added by one editor). I'm trying to cull & condense and just keep the essence / key info. EMsmile (talk) 11:17, 27 January 2023 (UTC)