Talk:2020 in climate change

For the time being, this Proposed guidelines section is transcluded to the talk pages of other years' articles.

Proposed guidelines

Proposed guidelines

This article is envisioned as one of a series documenting year-by-year occurrences pertaining to climate change. The series of articles will provide annual "snapshots" and "status updates" for future historians to determine "what was known, when" and "what happened, when".

1. Post content that is specific to a particular year. The yearly status of ongoing phenomena or actions is acceptable, but general scientific principles and expansive historical reviews are inappropriate here.
2. Make the text concise. (Background information, general principles, technical definitions, etc., should be put within citation footnotes, in the "Notes" section, or in other Wikipedia articles.)
3. Though Wikipedia is not a newspaper, individual events that were important in the then-current year may be appropriate.
4. Keep each entry brief, ideally a sentence or two.
5. Keep content organized in meaningfully titled sections (listed below)—not one long list.
6. Within each section, strive to arrange entries chronologically.
7. Strive to maintain section titles consistent in articles from year to year.

Initial section structure:

• Summaries — (prominent-source surveys putting the year in perspective)
• Measurements and statistics — (raw numerical values)
• Natural events and phenomena — (natural occurrences contributing to or resulting from climate change)
• Actions and goal statements (actions by humans; subsections:)

• Science and technology (e.g., measurement techniques, renewable energy technical advances, expeditions, etc.)
• Political, economic, legal, and cultural actions (causing or resulting from climate change)
• Mitigation goal statements — (e.g., climate emergency declarations, NDCs, net zero pledges, ...)
• Adaptation goal statements — (statements re coping with expected effects of climate change)

• Public opinion and scientific consensus — (scientific consensus studies, studies of public perceptions, etc.)
• Projections — (predictive estimates of future causes, effects, etc.)
• Significant publications — (major publications by prominent sources)
• See also — (links to other Wikipedia articles)
• Notes — (e.g., technical explanations not suitable for body text)
• References — (place full citations in bottom section, to keep narrative wikitext more compact)
• External links

—RCraig09 (talk), begun 06:08, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Invitation

Friendly notice to active editors (alphabetically) User:Bogazicili User:Chidgk1 User:dave souza User:Dtetta User:Efbrazil User:EMsmile User:Femkemilene User:NewsAndEventsGuy of this new article: your contributions, observations, and suggestions are welcome.

This 2020 edition is the starter version; I'm envisioning a series of articles, for reasons given at the top of the above box. —RCraig09 (talk) 07:25, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

• Looks good. Not quite familiar with notability criteria, but can't think of a reason to delete this. I'm noticing a bias towards Western countries. South Korea's net-zero pledge is missing for instance. I think we need to look at the top-level articles here 1990, 2020, to see whether vital climate events are missing. I believe these are the articles from which "in this day" are selected for the main page. Femke Nijsse (talk) 07:54, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. Any bias was in Google search results. I will continue adding content to some extent. I think that 2021 will yield a better article because it will develop month-by-month. —RCraig09 (talk) 17:17, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

• Interesting concept. Good as an archive but I am wondering how the view rates for such pages would look say ten years from now. Would anyone still look back year by year at that stage? Might result in good pages with low view rates though. For me, I am trying to focus on high view articles and have realised it's the country articles which is where I think we should invest some time, and some climate change content (as well as the sub-articles of "Geography of Country X" and "Climate of Country X"). RCraig09, could you help with the discussion and action on that one? See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Countries#How_much_content_about_climate_change_is_warranted_in_country_articles? EMsmile (talk) 08:03, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. This article doesn't focus on a "concept", so I agree it won't be a high-traffic article. However, I think that in future years the entire set of articles will be important, especially to those who study history to lay bare "what was known in 2020". Google search results will omit references that have become stale; these articles will preserve them. —RCraig09 (talk) 17:17, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

• I'm still concentrating on the main articles; I still couldn't get to making changes in the lead of the Climate Change article after months lol. I might return to this article after those, might be a good way to keep track of important developments in a year. Also might be a lot of potential in this year and next year, as lots of funding gets unlocked for transition projects. Bogazicili (talk) 05:26, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Thank you. Definitely, the main article(s) is/are more important. But I (optimistically) think this series of annual articles will be relatively easy to edit, since they're sets of lists of fairly simple occurrences—items that don't need much theoretical thinking, or merging into a complex discussion of scientific concepts, etc. —RCraig09 (talk) 05:51, 16 December 2020 (UTC)