Talk:Andrew Dessler

Rewrite being worked on

I am working on a rewrite of this article at User:MrBill3/sandbox/Andrew Dessler. I am not looking to do anything drastic but reformat a little and add references. I will expand as information from references I find warrants. - - MrBill3 (talk) 11:41, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

I have posted a rewrite. - - MrBill3 (talk) 14:38, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Confidence in catastrophic impacts vs real risk

The article currently states, "He asserted his confidence that the climate is warming due to human activity and that this will have 'catastrophic impacts'". This is sourced to Environment News Service. Dessler himself has presented a more clear explanation (essentially there is a real risk of catastrophic impacts) in a YouTube video, here. As this is the subject himself expressing his own opinion the current content should probably be qualified or clarified. - - MrBill3 (talk) 00:26, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

Just to expand on Bill's comment, this wikipedia article accurately quotes a new article that says I say that climate change will have catastrophic impacts. Either I misspoke or I was misquoted because I always refer to climate change as a **risk** and base my personal judgment that we should take action as a risk mitigation strategy. We don't know how bad climate change will be, but there's certainly a very real risk it will be truly terrible. The YouTube video mentioned above expands on my views on this. If possible, I'd prefer the article to better reflect that view. Thanks, Andrew Dessler adessler@tamu.edu — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.192.37.60 (talk) 02:18, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 3 external links on Andrew Dessler. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20140304164417/http://www.geography.osu.edu/coursedocs/2014_SP/Geog3901HMark.pdf to http://www.geography.osu.edu/coursedocs/2014_SP/Geog3901HMark.pdf
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20081013063247/http://www.epa.gov/electricpower-sf6/documents/conf06_bios.pdf to http://www.epa.gov/electricpower-sf6/documents/conf06_bios.pdf
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20131006223441/http://cires.colorado.edu/collaboration/fellowships/2013/dessler/ to http://cires.colorado.edu/collaboration/fellowships/2013/dessler/

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

• If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
• If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 10:44, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

new award

In 2018, I was selected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. https://today.tamu.edu/2017/11/22/andrew-dessler-named-a-fellow-in-aaas/ You may want to add that to my awards & honors list. Thanks, Andrew Dessler — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.24.35.45 (talk) 03:50, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Also, my book Introduction to Modern Climate change has 2nd edition, 2015. You might want to mention that in the book section. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.24.35.45 (talk) 04:18, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

External links modified (January 2018)

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Andrew Dessler. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20140122175048/http://www.asp.ucar.edu/thompson/thompson_lecture_archive.php to http://www.asp.ucar.edu/thompson/thompson_lecture_archive.php

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

• If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
• If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 22:43, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Review of edits by subject of the article

@Adessler, I have reviewed your changes as the declared subject of the article, as well as a cursory scan of it looking for any preexisting issues. Some of these I have begun to address, leaving detailed notes in my edit summaries for you to review. The most drastic edit was the removal of the entire Selected service section. If the edit note isn't sufficient explanation, we can discuss further.

There are additional concerns in preexisting content. The Awards and honors section is probably too lengthy. That section is typically for independently WP:NOTABLE awards (i.e., have a Wikipedia article) or have received coverage in WP:SECONDARY sources. Purely internal or "routine" awards typically don't qualify, for instance 1999 - NASA New Investigator Award. One which might make it is 2022 - "Friend of the Planet" award from the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). Even though there is no standalone article about the award, many Wikipedia biographies mention that their subjects have received it, suggesting a community consensus that it is worthy of putting in bios of its recipients. 2017 - Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science is a no-brainer since it is an independently notable honor. I'll offer you the first chance to pare this list down, and find any secondary coverage of the more notable items to bolster the case for keeping them.

The first paragraph of the Career section could use better citations. For instance this one I assume is written by you as most such speaker profiles tend to be. This one is fine per the criteria in WP:ABOUTSELF, but we really want independent secondary sources when we can find them. Any of your help on that front is appreciated everywhere in the article because there is a little too much reliance on primary sources in this article for my liking.

That's all I have for now. Let me know if you have questions or require assistance. Xan747 (talk) 23:16, 9 October 2025 (UTC)

Very much aligned with the edits @Xan747 made here, as directionally improving this article towards BLP standards. Agree that awards and honors is too lengthy, as well as possibly the 'selected' sections. I'll try to take a pass through that later today to see if I can help sort out what is and isn't significant. My larger concerns are around the heavy use of primary sources, over use of quotations, and summarization of policy positions that without non-primary sources look to me on first glance like they might have toed over the line into WP:OR territory. I'm ok with primary sources here as evidence that the talk took place, I'm much less comfortable with it veering into stating the position and policies that he espoused without an unrelated party making that connection. Either way, I don't think we need this level of detail around what he said at each talk/event. Maybe there is somewhere where a few sentences on his positions are reasonable, if it can be sufficiently sourced, but we don't need a blow by blow of every speaking appearance. I'll take a closer look here later today, and see if we can shrink those back to what is encyclopedic.

I'm also going to remove the personal life section. His marital status/number of children don't seem relevant, nor does his town. This one is very much a more marginal judgement call, if anyone disagrees, happy to revert and discuss. Driftingdrifting (talk) 17:08, 10 October 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for your review, @Driftingdrifting, we seem to be seeing the same things so I appreciate that validation. For full disclosure, I asked you specifically for this review because we've worked together before on another BLP with much worse issues than we're seeing here, and I found you to be thorough and fair. In case it wasn't already clear, most of the issues we're seeing predate Dessler's own edits, which he declared in his very first edit, so all is above-board as far as he's concerned. Let us know when you're done with your full review as there are some possible changes and additions I would like to explore as I have time. Thanks again! Xan747 (talk) 17:19, 10 October 2025 (UTC)

Don't block waiting for me if you've got stuff ready to go, I'll work around you. Either way, I was going to start by trying to dig up some additional 3P sources which I'll drop here. Driftingdrifting (talk) 17:33, 10 October 2025 (UTC)

I don't have things ready to go, and the changes/additions I'm contemplating could be substantial so I'm content to sit back and let you work on it as much as you'd like. Xan747 (talk) 18:47, 10 October 2025 (UTC)

I took a first pass, all yours. Feel free (as always) to revert/change/move/edit anything that makes sense to you, there's still a ways to go.

I spent a lot of time today looking for sources, and reading sources. The guy is very clearly notable, but I think we're going to essentially end up with a stub-to-starter here. Outside of his own articles and op-eds, there's very little written on him by others, and the quotes in other news articles tend to be pretty glancing - its an article about something else where he's consulted as a subject matter expert. Driftingdrifting (talk) 21:21, 10 October 2025 (UTC)

I'm happy to work with y'all to get this right, but I have some questions. And thanks for helping me. This page has bugged me for literally years, so I'm happy to spruce it up.

As requested, I pared down the awards list.

Second, you say "citation needed" for the statement: "His Substack newsletter is The Climate Brink, where he writes about climate science and energy." I'm not sure why that's needed — if you just look at it, you can see what we talk about. Would the substacks about page (https://www.theclimatebrink.com/about) qualify? If not, I'm not sure what else would help.

Third, I'm OK taking out the selected service section. I do wonder if there's a place to put some of these facts, e.g., that I'm the past president of the AGU's Global Environmental Change section. I was also on some high-profile NASA committees, as I listed, but I also realize that the web pages I linked to didn't indicate that directly. It was indicated if you looked at the documents linked to those pages, but I couldn't figure out how to link to a PDF document. Maybe there's another way to handle that, or we could just drop it.

I have other changes I'd like to make, e.g., get rid of the "Books" section and just list the books under publications. And a few others. We can get to that after sorting these issues out. Adessler (talk) 02:13, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

@Adessler, a citation to a secondary source describing your Substack is not strictly necessary, but would be good. A better tag might be . In any case, I can't find a wp:secondary source mentioning it; if you know of one, go ahead and drop it in. Otherwise there are workarounds; moving it to External links for now should be noncontroversial. The general philosophy is that too many self-citations are frowned upon, and anonymous Wikipedia editors shouldn't be trusted to peer-review them.

To touch on what @Driftingdrifting wrote above, I only became aware today of Wikipedia:Notability (academics). It is mostly aligned toward the yes/no question of whether an academic is notable enough for their own article (which you meet), but in the process gives implicit guidance on what kinds of awards, prizes, professional roles/professorships and publications are wp:due for inclusion in the article itself.

The following six citations already in the article are all good secondary sources where you are the topic of the article. If you know of others, drop them here (https://citer.toolforge.org/ is a nice tool for creating citation templates). These should form the core of your bio and career sections, which I will rewrite from scratch in my own sandbox this week. This will help me better visualize portions of the live article which may need to be de-emphasized or dropped. Plus some of the article is just ... strangely ... written and needs a good going-over.

With that core in place, we can then work out into your various op-eds and articles in which you were one of the principal experts cited, which is about double the number of sources. Your lead role in the DOE CWG rebuttal is fine as-is (and you have my personal thanks to your efforts there).

We don't need your books mentioned both in prose and under publications. I think those work best in prose, and should be based on book reviews and other secondary source mentions as much as possible, which I think is already the case. That's all I have for now. Xan747 (talk) 23:19, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

References