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Scientific argumentation why it's a crisis

This article currently lacks the reasoning why many climate scientists argue that we are in a climate emergency. Is is okay I lay out the reasoning first in the definition section and then in the second sentence of the lede, based on two scientific articles: the first BioScience article (primary source), which was used by Lenton's recent paper (secondary source)? I think this fits well within the scope of the article as it gives an explanation to why people changed the terminology from a scientific (instead of political) viewpoint. It is different from previous attempts at inserting argumentation for a crisis by just collecting alarmist articles about climate change. The argumentation consists of two aspect: there is little time to act left and the observed and projected effects of global warming are getting bad. Femke Nijsse (talk) 09:04, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

An important aspect of this question is whether we should consider 'climate crisis' and 'climate emergency' as synonyms. I think they are, but I'm open to suggestions otherwise. Femke Nijsse (talk) 08:51, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

@Femkemilene: You make very perceptive points. Generally, it has been a difficult task editing a neutral article about a term that is specifically adopted by many for its advocacy effects. To emphasize that there is scientific support (that it's not merely salesmanship), I added the Public Citizen quote box (prominently), and added to the lede that "Environmental and progressive organizations joined in an open letter[] characterizing climate change and human inaction as "what it is–a crisis".[]" You may find better summaries.
1. Re your first paragraph: I think a new section titled "Scientific basis" would be appropriate, though it invites forked/duplicated content from other articles (such as "Effects of GW"), and it would have to be forever monitored for advocacy-tinged content.
2. Re your second paragraph: true, "crisis vs emergency" is another difficult question. Based on my investigation in comparing terms for the new graph File:20200112 "Climate crisis" vs "Climate emergency" - Google search term usage.png (and my own strong impression from reading sources), I found that these two terms are exactly the ones most widely Google-searched, and as the graph shows, have usage patterns that have closely correlated for the last >year. Whether they are exact synonyms can be argued endlessly; significantly, I worry that opening the the floodgates to a first synonym ("emergency") would result in endless bloat for n>>1 other perceived synonyms; I have been able to limit that bloat to the "Alternative terminology" list section. Including "climate emergency" might require moving/renaming the article to clumsier titles like "Terminology characterizing GW and CC" or "History of nomenclature for GW and CC"—which would be difficult/impossible to gain consensus on. —RCraig09 (talk) 18:43, 13 January 2020 (UTC)
You cannot claim there is a scientific basis for calling it a crisis if you can't provide a reliable definition of crisis or emergency. There probably is no such thing in science as a crisis as science is focused on testable and untestable hypotheses. So we may need to look elsewhere for a helpful definition . Because of your personal bias against me, today you have both removed what is probably the best definition of a crisis/emergency available. Notagainst (talk) 01:26, 20 January 2020 (UTC)
I was not among those who removed some of Notagainst's latest edits (19 Jan 2020). However, I agree that Regina Phelps' definition of crisis—which was not even conceived in the context of climate change—is too abstract to be proper in this article's text and is therefore far from "the best definition" of climate crisis. Note that Mukheibir's climate-specific definitions remains in the article; at most, Phelps' words could be paraphrased within the Mukheibir footnote, merely to explain Mukheibir's reasoning. —RCraig09 (talk) 03:20, 20 January 2020 (UTC)
Since I was the editor who most recently removed it, let me explain why it's too long and confusing. Here is the text I removed: She describes a crisis emergency as a situation where: The threat has never been encountered before, so there are no plans in place to manage it. It may be a familiar event, however, it is occurring at unprecedented speed, therefore developing an appropriate response is challenging. There may be a confluence of forces, which, while not new individually, in combination pose unique challenges to the response. Her first sentence suggests that if there are any plans to manage climate change, then it'll no longer be a crisis. So if some international agreement is in place, then it's no longer a crisis? Next, "occurring at unprecedented speed" may or may not apply. Didn't climate change occur even faster when an asteroid hit the earth 60 million years ago? The three sentences together bring in irrelevancies that confuse the issue. As pointed out earlier, Phelps is not talking explicitly about climate, so perhaps her definition makes more sense in a different context. NightHeron (talk) 14:12, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

Requested move 30 December 2020

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Not moved (non-admin closure) (t · c) buidhe 14:17, 6 January 2021 (UTC)


Climate crisis → Climate crisis (term) – Climate crisis is widely used by reliable sources instead of or alongside climate change (see below), and should redirect there. The current article deals with the term itself rather than the topic it refers to and should be moved to Climate crisis (term). ─ ReconditeRodent « talk · contribs » 13:44, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

Example uses in reliable sources

Equivalent terms in other languages:

  • Oppose. The key point is that "climate crisis" is used alongside "climate change" (as nominator notes). Significantly, the two terms are not synonymous: one is a neutral scientific description ("change") and the other is a value-laden characterization ("crisis"). In fact, the entire article is largely predicated on how activists and politicians and scientists distinguish the term "climate crisis" from mere "climate change". The effect of redirecting from Climate Crisis to Climate Change would bury all this content in an article that few readers would ever find. (16:43, 30 Dec) Moreover, the intro to this article states that "Climate crisis is a term describing global warming and climate change, and their consequences, clearly distinguishing the terms. —RCraig09 (talk) 16:53, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
Climate change also includes its consequences. The emphasis of the terms is undoubtedly different but the scope of the topics is the same. The list shows that "climate crisis" is commonly used in a factual context by a wide variety of reliable sources; the argument that common terms are inherently "value-laden" may be a reason to pick a more neutral term as the article title (as with pro-life) or have a section on terminology (as with illegal immigration) but not to dedicate the entire page space to it. A hatnote would preserve intentional pageviews. ─ ReconditeRodent « talk · contribs » 19:12, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
  1. Properly defined, the term climate change does not "include" its consequences, especially consequences seen mainly anthropocentrically.
  2. Accordingly, the scope of the topics is not the same, any more than COVID-19 has the same scope as its consequences.
  3. Likewise, the article Climate change does not "include" its consequences; the "Effects" section not being the same as consequences.
  4. To choose "a more neutral term as the article title" would subvert the very basis for the article's existence! The entire article is largely predicated on how activists and politicians and scientists distinguish the term "climate crisis" from mere "climate change".
  5. Hatnotes would be ignored by many or most readers, especially if it's mixed in with the gaggle of disambiguation hatnotes already at the top of Climate change. (—20:13, 30 December 2020) It's also likely that consensus at the Climate Change article wouldn't even allow one more disambiguation hatnote on the reasoning that it would open floodgates to innumerable other hatnotes—thereby "burying" this article from view. —RCraig09 (talk) 17:24, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Merge climate communication to here?

I am just wondering if it might be useful to merge climate communication to here, or to merge both articles together under a new title, as they are pretty much about the same thing. They are both about how climate change is communicated and the term "climate crisis", as well as all of its derivatives, like "climate chaos", "climate emergency" etc. are all different ways to communicate the issues to the public. Looking at the view rates for both articles, they both linger at low view rates since their creation. I think a combined article would make sense. (happy to be shot down in flames now ;-) ) P.S. the article climate movement is also closely related, but more distinct, I guess. EMsmile (talk) 01:30, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

  • Nah. The articles are not about the same thing. "Climate crisis" as an 'urgent' term is much more specific and with a specific goal in mind (urging action); alternatively, "climate crisis" as a 'neutral' term can simply refer to climate change and its effects. In contrast, "climate communication" is concerned with the mechanics of conveying climate information. There's some overlap in content, of course, but neither concept contains or subsumes the other. —RCraig09 (talk) 04:28, 10 March 2021 (UTC)
I can see there are differences but I just wonder if both such articles would linger with small amount of content and low view rates, whereas a combined article (with a different title?) might end up stronger and better. If not, then it would at least be useful if each article explains a little the concept of the other article. So far, they are not interlinking very well with each other even though they have something in common, i.e. they are both about trying to urge action. EMsmile (talk) 13:58, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
I see there is substantive mention of Climate crisis at Climate communication#History of global warming, and I've added a See also section there. In the present article, I've added to the hatnotes, "For climate communication in general, see Climate communication." Possibly, more content could be added, but I definitely think that a merge is extremely inappropriate because use of Climate crisis is just one example of one approach to climate communication. Moreover, I don't think that increasing view rates, per se, is a valid goal within Wikipedia principles and guidelines. —RCraig09 (talk) 16:31, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
Thank you for clarifying this. If it comes out more clearly now in the two articles that "Climate crisis is just one example of one approach to climate communication" then my concerns are alleviated (it's useful to know which article is the "sub-article" to the other one ). I have a somewhat similar problem with the two articles climate resilience and climate vulnerability. I am not proposing a merger there but the two articles are basically about the opposite of each other which results in overlapping content. Again, I feel they are not interlinking well with each other and should be streamlined. If you have time, could you take a look at my talk page comment here? Thanks. EMsmile (talk) 01:31, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
I think that the section Climate communication#History of global warming (which is transcluded from the heavily-watched and actively edited Climate change main article) implicitly-but-clearly describes how usingClimate crisis is one example of how many choose that terminology "to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue" (words of The Guardian editor). Conversely, I think that resilience and vulnerability are essentially complementary expressions of the same general concept (I've added to the talk page that you linked at 01:31, 1 April. —RCraig09 (talk) 03:32, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 7 September 2021 and 23 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Vanessa Li (YYL). Peer reviewers: Abigailcampbell7.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 19:11, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

More participation needed in climate activist AfD

The AfD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dominika Lasota has been relisted twice, with the hope of getting more participation by experienced editors. Boud (talk) 19:01, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

Merger proposal

Original poster moved his proposed extreme-event material to a user sub-page on 25 January 2023, effectively withdrawing the merger proposal.

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

I propose merging Climate apocalypse and climate endgame into this article. Not only is there a significant overlap between all three articles, but the current article is both small enough to accommodate the merge of all relevant information and is by far the best of the three, lacking the fundamental issues which plague the other two articles. It is also already featured on Template:Climate change, making it easier to find within Wikipedia than the others.

Climate endgame article is devoted to a single "perspective" paper (a peer-reviewed opinion piece from scientists, more-or-less, rather than fundamentally new research) and the article itself consists of only a handful of small paragraphs, so it can be merged very easily without losing anything.

Climate apocalypse is a bit more complicated. Several sections fully fit the scope of this article and can be merged with only slight edits and no meaningful loss of information - I'm thinking about "Etymology and usage", "Narratives of climate change" and maybe "Famous figures" (although that is a very messy section and it would be difficult to retain it while setting non-arbitrary criteria on just who is famous enough for it). Parts of those sections could also be moved to Climate change in popular culture.

Unfortunately, the rest of the article is a badly sensationalized version of Effects of climate change, where it effectively ends up either uncritically fringe narratives, misrepresenting more reliable sources or performing what amounts to WP:SYNTHESIS on a range of obscure sources.

I have previously wrote my detailed criticisms of that article over at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Climate_change#Climate_apocalypse_and_climate_endgame_articles, and I guess I'll go over them again.

  • First paragraph of the lead: "A climate apocalypse (also called a climate dystopia and a climate-induced collapse, among other names) generally denotes a predicted scenario involving the global collapse of human civilization and potential human extinction as either a direct or indirect result of anthropogenic climate change. Many academics and researchers posit that in actuality, unless a major course correction is imminently implemented, some or all of the Earth will be rendered uninhabitable as a result of extreme temperatures, severe weather events, an inability to grow crops, and an altered composition of the Earth's atmosphere."

You can see already see that this section is very vague and full of WP:WEASEL. It technically has 4 references, but one is a YouTube video and the other three are basically the same, consisting of this paper and two news articles about it. Moreover, these sources are hardly even congruent with either each other or the text, since the video is about a 5 degree scenario, which is never even mentioned in the paper. In fact, the paper also makes no mention of any part of the Earth being rendered uninhabitable, and nor does it predict any "inability to grow crops". What's more, its "Ecological Overshoot: Population Size and Overconsumption" section ends with an acknowledgement that the authors do not actually expect the human population to decline due to climate change during this century. (Which is, of course, the mainstream scientific position, as represented by the IPCC reports, where the only reason why human population might be lower in 2100 than it is today is due to declining population-level fertility from widespread access to birth control.)

  • Most of the "Apocalyptic impacts of climate change and ecological breakdown" is basically the same as Effects of climate change, only briefer, less up-to-date and more editorialized/sensationalized. (I.e. sea level rise section immediately switches from one prediction of 2100 sea level rise to ultimate sea level rise from very long term ice sheet melt with no mention of the timelines.) Some exceptions include "Atmosphere" section, which makes extremely strong claims on the basis of two references that are nearly 20 years old, and "Mass extinction", which contains no up-to-date predictions of extinction risk from climate change and is just blatantly wrong with its paleo analogies (as in, the claim that "95% of living species were wiped out" during the Permian–Triassic extinction event is immediately contradicted by that very article.)

Lastly, several predictions at the end of the article are presented largely uncritically in a manner uncharacteristic (and unbecoming) of a Wikipedia article. Examples:

  • The way "What if we stopped pretending?" is described suggests that the only criticism of that opinion piece was due to its tone, and leaves open the idea that it was controversial simply for speaking hard truths. It ignores that Franzen was also found to have explicitly gotten the science wrong multiple times by the climate fact-checker Climate Feedback.
  • "The 2050 scenario" is presented completely uncritically and is used as a reference multiple times throughout the text. There is no mention that it was never peer-reviewed, that it wasn't written by scientists, or that it was also found non-credible by Climate Feedback.

In all, I suggest that we move every section to do with the communication of climate risks into this article (while also helping to put each one in its proper context: i.e. the sections on Franzen's piece and "2050 scenario" can stay, but only with their criticism from fact-checkers included), move the parts discussing popular culture to Climate change in popular culture, and just let go of the rest (mainly the poor version of effects of climate change) before turning that page into a redirect here, since there's no real value to salvage.

@RCraig09: as the primary author of this article.

@Ebenwilliams, Bluerasberry, Prototyperspective, and Alvarosinde: as the primary authors of climate apocalypse and climate endgame. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 06:26, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

  • Strongly oppose: This article is about the term "climate crisis", a term that is widely used by reliable sources to characterize the physical phenomenon of climate change and its effects. As a characterization, "Climate crisis" is not an extremist term, or itself an extreme physical phenomenon. I've already added Climate apocalypse and climate endgame to the "Alternative terminology" section, which I believe is the extent to which they are relevant here. (I think the CE article can be converted to a redirect to the CA article, for reasons discussed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Climate change.) —RCraig09 (talk) 06:42, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
I saw that post, but to me, it does not do anything to answer the most important question: why do we need to keep climate apocalypse as anything more than a redirect here? (And since you agree that these terms can be used interchangeably, redirecting those articles here would clearly make more sense than just deleting them outright.)
Yes, this is an article about the term, and it'll still stay that way after the relevant sections (the ones exploring terminology) are merged, and the rest are let go of. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 07:46, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
They are not used "interchangeably"! As my 06:42 18 Jan post demonstrates, "climate crisis" is a commonly-used reliably sourced characterization of the present reality, and "climate apocalypse" is a hypothetical physical situation that few if any reliable sources state as present reality. I placed the CA and CE terms in the more broadly renamed "Related terminology" section, because "related" is about as close as the subjects are; they're not alternatives. —RCraig09 (talk) 15:53, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose: this article is about the term "climate crisis", how it appeared and why. I think that it is important to know that the same physical phenomenon has been given different names, the reasons for this, and the evolution. This can be traced more easily if Climate crisis, Climate endgame and Climate apocalypse are preserved as independent articles, with all the crossed references and rewritings that may be found necessary. Alvarosinde (talk) 11:02, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Mild support. I support this and I think ITK would be up for the task of doing a good merger. However, it might work better though if you, ITK, first cull and rework the article climate apocalypse. I think it would then become clearer how a merger with this article would pan out. Also first merge climate endgame into climate apocalypse, I would say. EMsmile (talk) 08:36, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support because I think the info is more likely to be improved if it is in one article rather than 3 Chidgk1 (talk) 17:29, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
By that reasoning, we should merge apples and oranges, since they—both being fruits—are more similar than the reliably sourced CCrisis characterization versus CEndgame/CApocalypse hypotheses about the future.
  • Comment: Before posting, editors should review this Talk Page's Archives to see the long identity crisis this article had, before arriving in its current state—explicitly distinguishing the "climate crisis" characterization from "climate change" itself. —RCraig09 (talk) 21:18, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Comment: The Archives are certainly a tortured mess. Nevertheless, I still think that the current scope is far too narrow.

As my 06:42 18 Jan post demonstrates, "climate crisis" is a commonly-used reliably sourced characterization of the present reality, and "climate apocalypse" is a hypothetical physical situation that few if any reliable sources state as present reality.

The issue with this approach is its narrow focus on "present reality", while ignoring the future. We live in a world where the largest climate activist groups outright call themselves Extinction Rebellion and, quite literally, The Last Generation. To suggest that the bulk of their participants do not believe that "climate crisis (present) -> climate apocalypse (future)" is naive in the extreme. Considering the size of these groups, this belief alone is worthy of discussion, and I believe that this article is the best place to do so.

Right now, this article is too focused on "when?" and is extremely vague on "why?" The only points where it discusses the motivation behind the subject are this sentence in the lead.

In the scientific journal BioScience, a January 2020 article, endorsed by over 11,000 scientists worldwide, statedthat "the climate crisis has arrived" and that an "immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis.

and in the "Scientific Basis" + "Description" sections.

While powerful language had long been used in advocacy, politics and media, until the late 2010s the scientific community traditionally remained more constrained in its language.[13] However, in a November 2019 statement published in the January 2020 issue of the scientific journal BioScience, a group of over 11,000 scientists argued that describing global warming as a climate emergency or climate crisis was appropriate.[14] The scientists stated that an "immense increase of scale in endeavor" is needed to conserve the biosphere, but noted "profoundly troubling signs" including sustained increases in livestock populations, meat production, tree cover loss, fossil fuel consumption, air transport, and CO2 emissions—concurrent with upward trends in climate impacts such as rising temperatures, global ice melt, and extreme weather,[5] which in turn can also have many indirect impacts such as large-scale migration and food insecurity. Also in November 2019, an article published in Nature concluded that evidence from climate tipping points alone suggests that "we are in a state of planetary emergency", defining emergency as a product of risk and urgency, with both factors judged to be "acute".[15] The Nature article referenced recent IPCC Special Reports (2018, 2019) suggesting individual tipping points could be exceeded with as little as 1–2 °C of global average warming (current warming is ~1 °C), with a global cascade of tipping points possible with greater warming

In the context of climate change, Pierre Mukheibir, Professor of Water Futures at the University of Technology Sydney, states that the term crisis is "a crucial or decisive point or situation that could lead to a tipping point," one involving an "unprecedented circumstance."[4] A dictionary definition states that "crisis" in this context means "a turning point or a condition of instability or danger," and implies that "action needs to be taken now or else the consequences will be disastrous."[16] Another definition differentiates the term from global warming and climate change and defines climate crisis as "the various negative effects that unmitigated climate change is causing or threatening to cause on our planet, especially where these effects have a direct impact on humanity.

The issue is that this is so vague as to be read in almost countless ways, depending on the level of one's knowledge and assumptions. For many people, phrases like "untold suffering", "a global cascade of tipping points" and "the consequences will be disastrous" already bring up the idea of an apocalypse, and not the relatively dry scientific findings or whatever it is you think makes the two terms different. We do no favors to anybody by failing to delve deeper. After all, the article already has "Concerns about crisis terminology" section, even though I suspect it's frankly meaningless to an average person, full of quotes that are easy to misinterpret. I.e.

Finally, it may be counterproductive by causing disbelief (absent immediate dramatic effects), disempowerment (in the face of a problem that seems overwhelming), and withdrawal—rather than providing practical action over the long term.

Relying on this article alone, can anyone explain what "the long term" even is? To someone who genuinely considers themselves a member of The Last Generation (and people with such inclinations are more likely to be reading an article like this then most), it means something very different to what it means in the professional literature. Likewise, people do not care about whether or not something seems overwhelming, as much as they care about whether or not it actually is overwhelming. The way the article is structured, there is no way to get a clear answer on that point. (Just consider the first page image and what sort of a message it sends.)

In all, this article is overly narrow by not recognizing that the apocalypse rhetoric is a clear outgrowth of the crisis rhetoric, and consequently, they need to be discussed in tandem - which includes apocalyptic claims and the pushback they received. Some of those were in fact published in reliable sources as well - i.e. Franzen's piece, which was published in The New Yorker, generally considered more reliable than half the sources in "Related terminology". Likewise, if Greta Thunberg talking about "ecological breakdown" (itself a rather apocalyptic term), "ecological crisis" and "ecological emergency" is considered WP:NOTABLE and worthy of inclusion in this article, is there a defensible reason not to include Roger Hallam (activist) claiming that climate change would kill 6 billion people, and the media coverage + scientific pushback it received?

Finally, if you read the scientific paper where the term climate endgame was proposed in the first place, it does very little to actually advance a new hypothesis. In fact, much of the paper is devoted to terminology - precisely the scope of this article.InformationToKnowledge (talk) 07:54, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

Very impressive analysis, User:InformationToKnowledge! You have convinced me. :-) Still I think to convince others, start with weeding out any fluff and unsourced claims at climate apocalypse; then I think it would become clearer what the remaining content would be that would be merged to here. EMsmile (talk) 11:03, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
You (ITK) are essentially talking about a new article, not merely amending this article. Your long analysis misses the distinction between a characterization versus a real-world circumstance.(be it "climate change" or "CEndgame" or "CApocalypse") You appear to confuse the more extreme activist movements (which summarize possible futures using extreme language) with reliable scientific sources (which don't generally use extreme language to summarize actual circumstances). (Your cited PNAS journal article refers to "Our proposed “Climate Endgame” research agenda" !) These distinctions are not "naive", and to conflate the two here in a single article would detract from the perceived objectivity and credibility of the reliable sources in the minds of readers. —RCraig09 (talk) 18:04, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
@EMsmile Thank you! :) Interesting proposal, but I think I would rather sandbox the merged version of all three articles, so that you can all see the changes I would like to see made immediately, and without potentially triggering any edit conflicts on the existing articles.
@RCraig09 On the contrary; my point is that these distinctions do not tend to be sufficiently clear in the popular discourse, and we need to explicitly discuss them if we want people to actually be aware of them.
Right now, I think the "Related terminology" section of this article is actively counterproductive to what you say are the goals of this article: if the point is to only include reliable sources, then why are slogans contocted by an ad team (including incredibly scientific and not at all extreme "The Great Collapse" and "Earthshattering") allowed in the list with no further discussion, as if they were just as valid as all the other definitions? Does this really contribute to its "perceived objectivity and credibility"? And again, Hallam is effectively the second most influential XR figure after Greta herself: where is the logic behind allowing Greta's words about "ecological breakdown" in "related terminology" section, yet leaving out comparable statements from Hallam?
As for the "Endgame" PNAS article, I am actually far more interested in its own table of terminology, rather than its title.
Anyway, I'll try to present a draft of how I think the merged article should look like soon enough. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 07:28, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
My point was that the (renamed) "Related terminology" entries distinguish from what "Climate crisis"—the title of this article—means. I can see that a sentence should probably be added to emphatically distinguish "Climate crisis" from extremist characterizations of hypothetical futures. However, a full-on merger would prominently conflate those terms in readers' minds and make them think that the widely-used term "Climate crisis" is just another dramatic hyperbolic scare-scenario like CEndgame and CApocalypse. Aside: another point was that the PNAS article proposes (promotes?) an agenda for study; not a present reality. —RCraig09 (talk) 07:55, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

— Since you are relatively new to Wikipedia, you would be wise to perform less ambitious projects, such as cleaning up the CApocalypse article and merging a cleaned-up CEndgame into it. Those two articles are simply beyond the scope of the present (terminology) article, and you will save a lot of everyone's time, including your own, if you don't attempt a merge here. —RCraig09 (talk) 09:51, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
— WP:TOPIC summarizes the issue of article content. Since scientific consensus is that the climate crisis will NOT develop into (~alarmist) Apocalypse or Endgame scenarios, links to those articles are now kept in the /* See also */ section to avoid conflation with the widely used climate crisis. Aside: it's more productive on Talk Pages to focus concisely on Wikipedia policies rather than long essays. —RCraig09 (talk) 17:31, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Continued below, in "parallel draft by ITK. —RCraig09 (talk) 18:39, 21 January 2023 (UTC)
I guess there is no consensus about the merge discussion (not many people participated though). Perhaps an uninvolved editor should close it now? EMsmile (talk) 22:27, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
Agreed. The range of Apocalypse/Endgame hypothesized content wildly exceeds the consensus-established scope of this article as a term characterizing current climate change. —RCraig09 (talk) 23:11, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Parallel draft by ITK

(continued from above, "Merger proposal")

Once again, I believe that this characterization of the subject matter is flawed. However, you are right that the "essay"-length arguments here haven't done much, so instead, I'll simply present my draft of what I want the merged article to look like.
User:InformationToKnowledge/New_Climate_Crisis_Draft
It discusses the terminology, chronicles its evolution and provides the scienific context required to help the readers truly understand it. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 17:44, 21 January 2023 (UTC)
Oy. Upon my first read of your Draft, I think it's a long essay on a different topic, and doesn't conform so well to Wikipedia norms. For example, physically, the lead section is much too detailed. Substantively, the Definitions section has content (like Tipping points) that exceed the scope of what a "definition" is. Procedurally, it's an immense change from the present article which makes it practically impossible to make a before-and-after comparison re replacing an article that resolved its scope after long and difficult discussions and has since been stable. I can understand the impulse to warn readers of what the climate crisis can become, but you are really talking about another article and not amending this article about the term climate crisis. Your extensive draft doesn't merely provide what you call "context"; you must apply WP:TOPIC to this article about the term. You can obviously make valuable contributions to this encyclopedia, but I've never actually seen a wholesale replacement of an established article on this website. Never. —RCraig09 (talk) 18:06, 21 January 2023 (UTC)
... and in a few spots, I'm worried about WP:SYNTHESIS issues in unsourced sentences that seem like your own editorial summaries.
There's some valuable (though wildly out-of-scope) content there, so maybe an entirely separate article would be best (it would be hard to name). Separately, some content might be introduced, in small steps, to Climate communication or respectively into some of the articles in the /* See also */ section. —RCraig09 (talk) 18:39, 21 January 2023 (UTC)
Lead section: I was told earlier that the lead should be as detailed as needed to summarize all of the article, and that the ideal structure is four paragraphs and around 500 words. It is currently four paragraphs and 396 words.
Definitions: as you can see, I merged your "Scientific Basis" and "Definition" sections into one, because frankly, if you need a hidden comment to explain to the editors what the title of the section really means, it's not a good title, period. Maybe "Definitions" isn't the best title either, but calling it "Scientific Basis" inherently encourages the reader to think of the basis for why climate change is bad, and results in an unneeded confusion.
WP:SYNTHESIS: Please elaborate.
WP:TOPIC: Once again, I believe that the current article's scope is restricted far too narrowly, to the point where it outright crosses the line into WP:OVERSIMPLIFY and WP:CHERRY. Notably, the way the article is currently written implies that the key watershed was the publication of the third World Scientists' Warning to Humanity, which had emerged (seemingly) out of nowhere and then its publication had finally spurred the formal adoption of the term. This also preserves a clear separation between the term of the article and all the nasty apocalyptic scare stories.
It's a nice story. Too bad the timeline doesn't match.
Simply put: that third Scientists' Warning was published in November 2019. Yet, a Nature article published in September 2019 says that over 1,000 jurisdictions have already declared a climate emergency by then. The warning thus followed in the wake of this culture shift: it did not spur it on. If we are to credit someone with that shift in language, our main options are Al Gore and Antonio Guterres as initiators and Greta Thunberg and Katharine Viner as those who have done the most to build on it. As you can see, none of the four are scientists.
Your primary argument in opposing the merge and the changes in the draft essentially comes down to preserving the distinction between what you think is "the widely-used term Climate crisis" and "just another dramatic hyperbolic scare-scenario like CEndgame and CApocalypse". The fatal flaw with this line of thought is that in the real world, this distinction is so fluid that virtually all of the key sources cited in this article also have significant overlap with the subjects of the other two.
Consider that while Guterres was one of the most important high-profile figures to start using crisis/emergency terminology (as even the current article acknowledges), he had also used a range of other terms, as I chronicle in my draft. In fact, I got his statement about "path to suicide", from the CApocalypse article, where it is currently cited.
Consider that your current version of the article has two short paragraphs in its "Scientific Basis" section, with the first one devoted to that Scientists' Warning from 2019. Later on, you confusingly cite the follow-up 2021 warning in "Recent", lumping it in with all the media and political declarations (I chose to split those into separate sections and move the 2021 Warning to the same section as the 2019 one). You know who else cites both that 2021 warning and Guterres' statements? One of the PNAS replies to the "Climate endgame" paper, Climate change and the threat to civilization, which begins with the following observations.

In a speech about climate change from April 4th of this year, UN General Secretary António Guterres lambasted “the empty pledges that put us on track to an unlivable world” and warned that “we are on a fast track to climate disaster” (1). Although stark, Guterres’ statements were not novel. Guterres has made similar remarks on previous occasions, as have other public figures, including Sir David Attenborough, who warned in 2018 that inaction on climate change could lead to “the collapse of our civilizations” (2). In their article, “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2021”—which now has more than 14,700 signatories from 158 countries—William J. Ripple and colleagues state that climate change could “cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable” (3).

Because civilization cannot exist in unlivable or uninhabitable places, all of the above warnings can be understood as asserting the potential for anthropogenic climate change to cause civilization collapse (or “climate collapse”) to a greater or lesser extent. Yet despite discussing many adverse impacts, climate science literature, as synthesized for instance by assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has little at all to say about whether or under which conditions climate change might threaten civilization. Although a body of scientific research exists on historical and archeological cases of collapse (4), discussions of mechanisms whereby climate change might cause the collapse of current civilizations has mostly been the province of journalists, philosophers, novelists, and filmmakers. We believe that this should change.

Moreover, your second paragraph in the "Scientific Basis" is devoted entirely to a Nature commentary warning about tipping points. Now, two authors of that commentary, Schellnhuber and Rockström, have both opined that the warming of 4+ degrees would, in their view, reduce the present human population to a fraction of its size: Schellnhuber is also already quoted in the CApocalypse article explicitly warning of civilizational collapse in that scenario. Most importantly, all but one of the authors of that Nature commentary have proceeded to contribute to "Climate endgame". So, the very scientists your version of the article credits with providing "Scientific Basis" for the "Climate Crisis" term have also originated the "Climate Endgame" term.
In all, while it is certainly possible to assert climate crisis without believing that it would go as far as the apocalyptic outcomes of substantial fraction of the human population dying due to its effects and/or the collapse of organized society/civilization in some form (let alone the ultimate apocalyptic outcome of human extinction/extinction of life on Earth), as evidenced by a substantial fraction of IPCC scientists or the Ghastly Future paper I linked in my draft and at the start of the thread, this distinction is not made by all of the most high-profile advocates of this term. Considering this, it makes no sense to keep the articles separate. In fact, I would go as far as to say the current version of the article effectively conceals crucial information from the reader about the openly stated beliefs of most of its sources. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 03:51, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
Your continued essay-ing makes it difficult to be brief in response, but I'll try:
— This encyclopedia article (not a comprehensive essay) is purposely directed narrowly to the term climate crisis, not to what the real-world climate crisis might hypothetically become. If you want to change the scope of an article, you are talking about another article altogether.
— The /* Scientific basis */ section was a late insertion to assuage some editors' fear that readers would get the idea that the term "climate crisis" was merely alarmist hyperbole. The purposely-brief /* Scientific basis */ section has served its purpose and should not be embellished beyond the article's scope; the basis for rational concern is expressed in the Climate change article.
— What cited authors have elsewhere stated/implied about the real-world climate crisis hypothetically becoming (apocalypse/endgame), is irrelevant. For you to assemble their "other" statements in the essay as you have, is your own editorial WP:SYNTHESIS. Related: your assertion that a "distinction is not made by all of the most high-profile advocates" is your own (doubtful) personal opinion, and does not destroy the distinctions.
— Your essay tries to cover too many mutually distinct subjects for a single encyclopedia article:
  1. linguistic terms per se versus physical-reality scenarios
  2. present reality versus hypothetical future realities
  3. reliable-source terminology versus alarmist hyperbole
  4. (possibly other distinct subjects I haven't noticed)
— I think some of your essay's content would be valuable if distributed among various existing articles (e.g., Climate communication), but your essay goes wildly beyond the scope of the term "climate crisis"—or any other single subject for that matter. If you were to submit it as a standalone article, what article name would summarize both sides of all 3+ items in my list? Please answer that question in ~six words or less (no more essays, please). —RCraig09 (talk) 05:27, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
Just letting you know that I would rather give other editors a chance to see my draft and comment on it before taking this discussion further. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 05:58, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Article name (location for extreme-scenario content)

What article name would summarize both sides of all 3+ items in my list? It's the threshold question defining where your new content belongs. —RCraig09 (talk) 06:17, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Look, I would simply disagree that the current structure of the article is out-of-scope. Since your position is very clear, I have been curious as to what the other editors might say.
However, I do have an alternative proposal.
1) Everything in my draft up until "Language drift and common misconceptions" is moved into the current article. Nearly all the content there is the same as in the current article, only rearranged to be more navigable. There are relatively few new additions.
2) Everything starting from the second paragraph of "Language drift and common misconceptions" (since the first simply paraphrases your "alternative terminology" section, which I guess will just stay more-or-less as is) is used as a basis for an article with one of the following titles:
Catastrophic risks of climate change
OR
Climate change and human survival
OR
Climate change and civilization
And then CApocalypse and CEndgame are turned into redirects to that article. All of the proposed titles can be argued with (and I'm open to other suggestions), but all of them are far better than CApocalypse, which simply sounds like a competitor term to CCrisis and provokes confusion. (Imagine readers' reaction if both articles were included in the climate change template under their current names, rather than just this one.) InformationToKnowledge (talk) 06:51, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
I struggle to follow this exactly but I do find it an interesting conversation between two people with a lot of climate change knowledge. Is there an easy way to see in the draft article which parts are new & different to climate crisis and which are the same? And I do like the idea of having an article under the topic of Catastrophic risks of climate change (or similar title), rather than climate apocalypse. However, wouldn't it overlap a lot with Tipping points in the climate system (and also with effects of climate change) - or how would you ensure that they go neatly hand in hand and don't overlap too much. Also, is some of your text too much written like a literature review and with original research? There is a guidance called "Cite review articles, don't write them." (WP:MEDRS). Just wondering. EMsmile (talk) 11:33, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
"Extreme climate change scenarios" neutrally captures what is distinct from this "Climate crisis" article—which has been stable in scope after extensive group discussion three years ago. —RCraig09 (talk) 16:50, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
Well, the idea is to have an article whose purpose would be to silo off the claims of climate change leading to societal collapse and/or human extinction, combined with their treatment in media and scientific literature. Essentially, an article which would be excerpted in the "Possibility of societal collapse" section of Effects of climate change: currently, it links to CEndgame and Global catastrophe scenarios (which is a messy and sensationalistic article itself). Confusingly, the latter then mainly quotes from CApocalypse - providing further proof why a more clear and focused article is needed.
However, making this goal sufficiently explicit in the title of the article is a key issue. I agree that "Catastrophic risks" title is not ideal because the threshold of what should count as a catastrophe is subjective, and it typically stops well below a collapse of civilization and the like. I also do not think the proposal made by @RCraig09 fits, because "Extreme climate change scenarios" implies a sort of parity between the subject matter of the article and Climate change scenario, which is very far from the truth.
This is why I am leaning more and more towards Climate change and human carrying capacity, since it gets to the heart of the matter - papers, articles, etc. asserting that climate change will result in mass mortality and/or permanent reduction of population from its present/near-future size and/or permanent reduction in the technological or social complexity would all go there, and nothing else would. This would help a lot to clarify the distinction between those and the consensus body of science. As a bonus, it could also help with cleaning up the carrying capacity article, which is pretty messy itself. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 06:41, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
There's another related article that I just came across: Extinction risk from climate change. It talks about extinction risk for plants and animals but maybe it could be folded in as well, or at least looked at and improved. - I'm not sure about your proposed title of Climate change and human carrying capacity; seems a bit academic and might linger with low pageviews. EMsmile (talk) 09:11, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
Trust me, I know that article very well; after all, I rewrote it almost entirely over these past few days! I strongly believe its scope should be limited to a list of reliable projections on plant and animal extinctions related to climate change specifically which would not fit anywhere else, and that is what I made that article into.
A section about speculation on human extinction and the like would not only look very awkward next to a wave of peer-reviewed studie, but it would not even help with discovery of the topic - right now, the "exinction risk" article receives far fewer views than the more general-purpose Holocene extinction anyway. (And Holocene extinction could probably do with a clean-up itself.)
I think that if the "Carrying capacity" article is linked throughout Wikipedia on every relevant article (i.e. if it was linked to on the "main" carrying capacity article, if the "extinction risk" article got an "about" note directing readers there for a discussion of human extinction, if effects of climate change and global catastrophe scenarios both excerpted it, etc., then the views would soon be adequate for its purpose. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 18:31, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

ITK: as a rule, it's best to make changes incrementally with specific edit comments, especially in your first few thousand edits on Wikipedia.(totally new articles excepted since there was nothing to "change" to begin with) Incremental changes let the community of editors see what is proposed, and respond accordingly before anyone has spent inordinate amounts of time. Subject matter expertise is very different from Wikipedia experience, and massive changes can be disruptive and can be interpreted as a violation of WP:OWN. Related: brevity is king, both in the article space and on Talk Pages. —RCraig09 (talk) 18:49, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

If this is no longer about climate crisis, should the discussion rather continue at the talk page of WikiProject Climate Change? And I don't like the proposed title with carrying capacity in it - nobody searching on Wikipedia (or even on Google) would search for that term. Also I have my concerns about the article Extinction risk from climate change and have written on the talk page there (I think the title or the scope needs adjustment; also it's written like a literature review and is not encyclopedic in this current format). EMsmile (talk) 22:30, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
Experience tells us the discussion will explode in verbiage that should not burden the WikiProject. The fact that we're having so much trouble naming the article, shows how unfocused the essay content is. Someone could initiate the Talk Page of ITK's essay itself, and maybe link that Talk Page on the WikiProject. But first, the essay should be renamed/moved to a place that doesn't have "Climate crisis" in the title. Probably, the essay's content will be broken up and dispersed across articles as part of the Apocalypse/Endgame cleanup/merger. —RCraig09 (talk) 23:38, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
I understand that my approach is unusual and can be troublesome to deal with, but consider the flip side, which is WP:NOW. We are not discussing how to best improve articles on ancient history: the quality of the information we end up presenting in these articles has clear real-world ramifications. Perhaps my writing slips into essay style (repeatedly calling it that is less clever than you think), but that's what happens when I try to move fast and build things.
Anyway: I followed up on my earlier suggestion and split the draft in two.
User:InformationToKnowledge/New Climate Crisis Draft - same link as before. Same scope as this article now, only 592 words larger, and I consider its layout superior to the present version.
User:InformationToKnowledge/Climate change and civilizational collapse draft - the article where I suggest we ultimately merge CApocalypse and CEndgame to. Still an early and clearly rough version. I suppose that further discussion should indeed take place on its talk page. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 10:34, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
— Especially for new editors, the preferred way to edit articles is to do so incrementally, with specific edit comments, so the community can understand any reasoning for each change. One should not submit an entire replacement of an established article that requires others to compare two ~3,000-word documents!
— The Apocalypse/Endgame material definitely belongs in an article separate from this Climate Crisis article. —RCraig09 (talk) 16:44, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support for merging Climate apocalypse and Climate endgame articles into an article about "Climate change and civilizational collapse" and that the article is named Catastrophic risks of climate change with the former redirecting to that.
This article should then be linked from Global catastrophic risk either be partly transcluded to or improve Global catastrophe scenarios#Climate change. The climate crisis article should also contain sufficient info and a lead-wikilink about this. I haven't checked the draft(s) in detail but the general concept and work is due and needed, some possibly useful media for it can be found in this new commons cat.
No valuable information from the two articles should be lost but sections should be short (keep it brief and add subsections). I think it would be good if the article was moved to article-space asap and that it is structured by issues, topics, risk-elements, etc instead of chronological albeit the "Modern discussion" section could be kept as is even if that means some contents are slightly duplicate (reader can choose to read by chronological order or by topics).
Prototyperspective (talk) 10:51, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Just a house keeping update: in the meantime, the article Climate endgame has been merged into Climate apocalypse. Discussions about this, and further work, are available here at the WikiProject Climate Change talk page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Climate_change#Climate_apocalypse_and_climate_endgame_articles EMsmile (talk) 13:18, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

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