Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of scientific bodies with official statements on human-cause global climate change


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   delete.  MBisanz  talk 07:10, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

List of scientific bodies with official statements on human-cause global climate change

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This article is a subset of the article Scientific opinion on climate change and doesn't seem to me to be able to offer anything that that article cannot. Furthermore, classifying these bodies this way is WP:OR and WP:SYN. "Affirming" human-caused climate change is difficult to define, and attempting to distill a primary source into a binary yes/no without secondary sourcing is improper. What was the question again? Are they agreeing that humans have any effect on climate at all? Are they agreeing with every word of the last IPCC assessment? The article makes no distinction between these two and it can't because it's simply the opinion of WP editors as to what these long and complex statements agree about. Contrast this with scientific opinion on climate change, which provides quotes and context so that the nuance of the societies' actual positions is maintained.

A classic example of this is the first link I clicked on from this article: Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences. The "affirmation" of the IPCC position at that link is tenuous at best, and nowhere does it say that GHGs cause warming, only that CO2 causes "consequences" for the climate. Does this belong on this list? Isn't it OR to draw that conclusion without a secondary source?

The premise of this list is flawed from the getgo and any useful content should be merged back to Scientific opinion on climate change. Oren0 (talk) 08:45, 27 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Delete Content fork, and redundant to, Scientific opinion on climate change. -Atmoz (talk) 17:49, 27 February 2009 (UTC)


 * My motivation for creating this list was to provide readers with a quick and easy reference to the scientific bodies included in Scientific opinion on climate change.  When that article first started out, there were maybe 15 or so organization, and each one had it's subheading shown in the table of contents.  Readers could quickly and easily scroll down the TOC and read their names.  However, the number of organizations kept growing and growing and the TOC got to be too long and cumbersome.  We finally had to regroup the organizations into their respective disciplines and collapse the TOC.  This improved the quality of the article, but it took away reader's ability to see all the scientific bodies on a single page.  The creation of this alphabetized list simply provides a more concise reference tool for readers interested in the topic.--CurtisSwain (talk) 00:17, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I understand the motivation but my problem is the inherent WP:OR problem with placing these societies into arbitrary buckets. The scientific opinion article has this same issue, though it's to a lesser degree because at least on that page there is some amount of context. Oren0 (talk) 03:44, 28 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Delete Should we have lists of bodies which have made statements upon other matters - the credit crunch, the war against terror, votes for women, free trade, etc? Such lists multiply vexatious matters in an unhelpful way.  If important bodies have made relevant statements upon topics then they may be cited as sources and this seems adequate for our encyclopedic purpose. Colonel Warden (talk) 08:52, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete for reasons given by Warden. This tends toward indiscriminate information-gathering. WillOakland (talk) 11:06, 28 February 2009 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.