Talk:Causes of climate change

Overedited sentence no longer makes sense

I do not know the subject well enough to correct it. Have not checked the footnotes, though. Here is the sentence: Thus, both effects are considered to each other out, and the warming from each unit of CO₂ emitted by humans increases temperature in linear proportion to the total amount of emissions. Anitissamalicious (talk) 15:10, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

PS The problem is the verb missing after "considered to." It might be "cancel," and then again, it might be "balance," and then again it might be something else completely. Anitissamalicious (talk) 15:12, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

Beyond the longstanding issue with a confusing sentence: the second and third paragraphs are too detailed-sciency-techy for the lead in a layman's encyclopedia article. That content belongs somewhere in Greenhouse effect. The basics of the GHE should be briefly explained in the lead rather than obliquely referred to as if Everyman is already familiar it. —RCraig09 (talk) 19:45, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

The questionable language was introduced in this massive edit by User:InformationToKnowledge. By this post, I request clarification. The existing cite "[8]:746" fails verification as there is no page 746. Please clear up the issues re the appropriateness of techiness level of the last two paragraphs of the lead. —RCraig09 (talk) 21:31, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

It is page 746 when AR6 WG1 is viewed as a single, full PDF, but not in the single chapter-specific PDF. The specific wording being cited is As cumulative emissions increase, weakening land and ocean carbon sinks increase the airborne fraction of CO2 emissions (see Figure 5.25), but each unit increase in atmospheric CO2 has a smaller effect on global temperature owing to the logarithmic relationship between CO2 and its radiative forcing. Then the paragraph discusses a few high-profile studies, and concludes with Overall, there is high agreement between multiple lines of evidence (robust evidence) resulting in high confidence that TCRE remains constant for the domain of increasing cumulative CO2 emissions until at least 1500 PgC, with medium confidence of it remaining constant up to 3000 PgC because of less agreement across available lines of evidence. There are also multiple times throughout the chapter where it says that the "TCRE" is effectively linear, i.e. the near-linear relationship between cumulative CO2 emissions and global warming (TCRE).

Thus, to answer the question by @Anitissamalicious, "balance" is probably the best verb.

@RCraig09: Right, somewhere in the greenhouse effect. I think that says it all: I doubt even you can tell which parts of that article are actually useful for laymen and which ones are basically textbook inserts no-one actually reads beyond glancing at the formulas. You are absolutely correct that article should explain that the greenhouse effect is actually logarithmic, but the way in which it'll be experienced by humans is linear: the problem is that its structure is such a mess with no clear path to improvement that I am not sure where to even add that.

Lastly, a lead to a decent-sized article should consist of several paragraphs. What would be your alternative to the current 2nd and 3rd paragraph of the lead?

Here, I should probably remind to everyone taking part in this conversation that one of the key motivations behind creating this article in the first place was to lighten the Climate change article by offloading some of the details from its Causes section to here. That was the reason why sections such as "Land surface changes" and "Aerosols" are virtually identical between here and Climate change. However, as it so often happens with that article, WP:STATUSQUO prevailed and so we are stuck with duplicated paragraphs, no other editor apparently noticing or caring. If we are giving this article a second look to the point of rewriting the lead, it's probably a good idea to figure this whole aspect out as well. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 13:04, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

Our first duty is to our mostly-layperson readers, not to a perceived guideline tying lead size to article size. @InformationToKnowledge: To answer your question re alternatives to the present 2nd and 3rd paragraphs: I would replace the logarithmicish- and linearproportionalish jargony paragraphs that explain the inner sciency workings of the GHE with what actually causes climate change—per the article title: a judicious bit of expansion of the existing first paragraph, focusing qualitatively on basic concepts (GHE, GHGs, aerosols) based loosely on the dominant categories in the current graphic: . Above all, the lead should be immediately understandable to the average person returning from a political rally. —RCraig09 (talk) 20:37, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

Revision of lead to include short description of GHE

Per my post of 19:45, 20 Jan 2025, I've added a one-sentence description of the greenhouse effect, which underlies the causes of climate change that are the very subject of this article. I've re-worked surrounding sentences accordingly. —RCraig09 (talk) 20:34, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

What happened to the fingerprint parts?

That's the most important thing in climate change attribution.. It's almost completely disappeared from this article.. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 17:59, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

Looks like they were deleted by InformationToKnowledge

I am also seeing large-scale removals by EMsmile

Fingerprinting parts did not make it to History of climate change science.

I don't understand why so much was removed. This article is only 2,604 words.

I think a potential solution would be simply to do a mass revert to early 2024. Bogazicili (talk) 18:28, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

You want to revert back to for example this version (19 January 2024)? Why exactly? Undo all the work that has been done the in the last 18 months on this article, just because a section on fingerprinting was moved/deleted? Like you noted above, the fingerprinting content was mainly deleted in the edit by InformationToKnowledge on 13 March 2024; in the edit history it says: "Reworking the article, including some material taken from climate change (see page history for attribution.) This work had been previously done on my user sandbox and is moved here as per talk page agreement.". EMsmile (talk) 21:43, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

Is it possible that the content you are looking for is in this section: "Human-caused influences" but just not called "fingerprinting" anymore? Also if I remember correctly we had decided at the time to trim down the content about "attribution science" (which then went into here instead: Extreme event attribution). But I can't remember exactly. I just remember we discussed for a long time how the causes of climate change article should be structured. Probably User:InformationToKnowledge will remember the details and can remind us (or see on the talk pages).EMsmile (talk) 22:05, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

Would you prefer to bring the old content about "fingerprint studies" back? It was here in the 13 March 2024 version: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Causes_of_climate_change&oldid=1213481783#%22Fingerprint%22_studies EMsmile (talk) 22:06, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

I put it back but I am not an expert so if I am wrong feel free to revert or change Chidgk1 (talk) 17:44, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

@Chidgk1 as a climate scientist, though not an expert of attribution/fingerprinting, the text reads as probably correct. i think it is mixing what i would think of as "attribution' (i.e. using a model to remove anthropogenic effects and seeing which simulation is closest to observations) vs "fingerprinting" (i.e. things observed that would be expected to happen from anthropogenic forcing but not other kinds of forcing). its possibly my interpretation of these terms is not the most widely assumed, but there certainly are two kinds of analysis being spoken about in the section. i havent read the article as whole so im not commenting on the value of the text within the article. DecFinney (talk) 21:26, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

EMsmile what overview sources did you use while restructuring this article?

On what basis were content removed or added? Bogazicili (talk) 18:01, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

It's a while ago that I worked on this article so I can't remember the exact details for each edit in e.g. November 2023. I would have to look at the talk page archive. If you want to know exactly the train of thought of the various editors involved at the time, please take a look at the talk page archive, e.g. here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Causes_of_climate_change/Archive_3#What_does_this_article_currently_achieve? . I also try to put useful information in the edit summaries of each of my edits.

I hope User:InformationToKnowledge has time to come to this talk page again because they did the bulk of this work. It was a complicated discussion to change the previously called "attribution of recent climate change", to causes of climate change. EMsmile (talk) 21:31, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

You can see the previous discussion on the talk page of the sandbox of User:InformationToKnowledge here in February 2024: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:InformationToKnowledge/sandbox . It was complicated. I wasn't the main driver or contributor at the time but saw my role more as an assisting role. EMsmile (talk) 21:38, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

That sandbox discussion led to the sweeping change here on 13 March 2024 by User:InformationToKnowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Causes_of_climate_change&diff=1213485572&oldid=1213481783 with the edit history saying "Reworking the article, including some material taken from climate change (see page history for attribution.) This work had been previously done on my user sandbox and is moved here as per talk page agreement." . I would like to point out that the work by InformationToKnowledge has always been (in my opinion) very impressive and well thought through. So personally I think they did a great job in reworking the article and to arrive at a stable and useful article. Whether the information on "fingerprinting" was removed rightly or wrongly, I have no opinion about. EMsmile (talk) 21:43, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

To respond to why moving this to extreme event attribution doesn't quite work: the science of attributing overall climate science is much older and uses different arguments than the newer event attribution research. I'm happy with the restoration, thanks chidgk1. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 18:26, 9 August 2025 (UTC)

Missing citations

Hello Chidgk1! In , you added a footnote for the named reference <ref name=":03" /> but there is no definition for this footnote and the result is a referencing error. There's also the undefined citation "Karl others 2012", which seems ill-formed in addition to being nudefined. Are you able to provide the missing citations for these references so the errors can be fixed and the material made verifiable? -- mikeblas (talk) 17:33, 28 September 2025 (UTC)

Duh sorry don’t know why I didn’t notice that at the time - hope ok now Chidgk1 (talk) 12:37, 29 September 2025 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 24 June 2026

Informing to know the sources for our pre-research in school. ~2026-36670-83 (talk) 12:34, 24 June 2026 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want made. Please detail the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. LizardJr8 (talk) 12:37, 24 June 2026 (UTC)