Talk:Climate change
1. Should edits on controversial topics be discussed beforehand?
2. We have here a dilemma of riches- so many topics, so little time. How to focus and prioritize? One way is to look at which pages are the most popular.
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Example items that could use editing- P1: Certain human activities have also been identified as significant causes of recent climate change, often referred to as "global warming".[1] (a controversial claim)
Terminology, P2: Within scientific journals, global warming refers to surface temperature increases while climate change includes global warming and everything else that increasing greenhouse gas levels will affect.[5] (A directive on proper use of propaganda? Directly contradicts the previous definition of climate change.)
Glaciers, P3: A world glacier inventory has been compiled since the 1970s, ... This compilation tracks more than 100,000 glaciers covering a total area of approximately 240,000 km2, and preliminary estimates indicate that the remaining ice cover is around 445,000 km2. (Not clear how the two figures relate or what the second refers to. "the remaining ice cover" is subtle propaganda- what if the ice cover is increasing?. It's interesting that Global Warming has a red link but no page anymore.) Now over to https://ea.infogalactic.com/info/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_changeRectified (talk) 22:40, 3 April 2016 (CEST)
I believe the idea is to stick entirely to the factual level at this stage -- so excise P1 (way-controversial conclusion drawn from facts, not a fact) and P2 (really weaselly, and the definition belongs at the top of the article anyway) entirely, and rewrite P3 to say "preliminary estimates indicate that the ice cover area is around 445,000 km^2 as of [whenever]". I really don't like Wikipedia's stupid trick where they smuggle in controversial statements by saying "It has been identified (or whatever word) that X. [cite: someone saying X somewhere]". Yeah, someone undeniably said it, but that belongs at the opinion level... Famous Mountain (talk) 13:56, 4 April 2016 (CEST)
- Thank you, FM. This is hard to do! It is a fact that "climate change" means 'the change in climate over time', and it is also a provable fact that the phrase has been adopted as a classification* device, to replace "global warming", so the Terminology-P2 Wiki passage is correct in its way. *I wrote "propaganda" at first.
