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
 * 3) Climatic changes is currently a redirect with only 1 link. So wrong internal links are set to not become a big problem here.
 * 4) 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.

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. ~)

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.''



-

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
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
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.

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.''



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.''


 * 1) 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)
 * 2) 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
I'd like to discuss a broad set of options for the article name:
 * 1) Global warming
 * 2) Climate change
 * 3) Global warming and climate change.
 * 4) Current climate change
 * 5) Global climate change
 * 6) Climate crisis
 * 7) 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)
(| )

Insert table here with three options per proposed name: support, consent, oppose

Discussion

 * 1) 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)
 * 2) 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)
 * 3) 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)
 * 4) 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.
 * 1) Strongly agree about excluding "climate crisis". NightHeron (talk) 18:54, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
 * 2) 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
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
'''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 (,, but ), books  and information websites for lay people
 * 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..