Talk:Climate sensitivity

I'm quite confident the article will pass the GA nomination (or in the worst case, the next one), so will start preparing for a WP:Did you know.

1. ... that climate scientist can estimate climate sensitivity to {{CO2}} by studying how much climate changed in Earth's past.{{Cite web|last=McSweeney|first=Robert|url=https://www.carbonbrief.org/what-a-three-million-year-fossil-record-tells-us-about-climate-sensitivity|title=What a three-million year fossil record tells us about climate sensitivity|date=2015-02-04|website=Carbon Brief|language=en|access-date=2019-09-28}}

Please leave a comment if you'd like a different fact or a rewording.

{{ref-talk}}

{{Talk:Climate sensitivity/GA1}}

{{Did you know nominations/climate sensitivity}}

• [https://www.climateemergencyinstitute.com/high_climate_sensitivity.html List of related papers]
• [http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130926_PTRSpaperDiscussion.pdf Informal discussion by expert]

I came here to make some quick improvements to the readability of the lead. However, as the article is a GA article, I hesitate to jump straight in. Is anyone who was involved in the earlier GA review still here and open to readability improvements? Currently the entire third paragraph and almost the entire first paragraph lights up in dark red with the readability tool. Also, I find the caption for the image in the lead is rather long and complicated. Pinging User:Jonesey95 and User:Femke. - I am happy to give it a go but don't want to step on anyone's toes (and might also not get it perfectly right on the first go as it's not my area of expertise). EMsmile (talk) 12:51, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

:You're not stepping on my toes. [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Climate_sensitivity&diff=1214985873&oldid=944794922 Many of the changes] since my copy edits in 2020 are clear improvements; some of them make me wince a bit that I missed them. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:28, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

:: Feel free to step in here. I've rephrased the 3rd paragraph. The sentences are still long, but they should be much clearer now. If in doubt about whether your suggestions change the meaning, feel free to ping me again. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 16:26, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

:::OK, thank you to both of you for your quick replies. I'll do some cautious editing for readability tomorrow or otherwise when I get back from holidays in a week from now. Thanks for working on the 3rd paragraph, too. The readability tool now shows a light red instead of a dark red for the first sentence of the 3rd para. So that's progress. Of course this readability tool is not the "be all and end all" but overall I find it very useful. It "punishes" multi-syllable words though, so with the 5-syllable word "sensitivity" it won't be easy to get the reading ease score up. EMsmile (talk) 21:54, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

:::: I've done a bit of work on the reading ease and the structure of this article (see details in my edit summaries). I hope everything is correct. I'll add some questions below in separate sections. EMsmile (talk) 10:30, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

::::: However, the last sentence of the lead still has a low readability score but I don't know how to improve on that: {{tq|Estimates of climate sensitivity are calculated by several methods: by looking directly at temperature and greenhouse gas concentrations since the Industrial Revolution (so around 1750 onwards), by using indirect measurements from the Earth's distant past, and by using climate models to simulate the climate.}} EMsmile (talk) 10:38, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

::::::That shows that these readability tools should not be blindly believed. The sentence is easy to parse. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 16:11, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

:::::::It's fairly easy to understand, yes, but someone trained in science communication could probably improve it further. Anyhow, happy to live with it like this. - I find the tool a wonderful helper just to point out those sentences that are (potentially) difficult to understand. EMsmile (talk) 08:17, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

I have published in the section "Using data from Earth's past" the next text:

"In 2024, a group of scientists used sediments from the Pacific Ocean for checking the climate sensitivity to CO2 concentration, and found that a doubling of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere could cause an increase in temperature of 7-14 degrees."

This is the link.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/06/240624125500.htm

It was deleted as "single study of a small area".

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Climate_sensitivity&oldid=prev&diff=1233134102

I do not think it is correct. I am not sure that the others studies in this section are bigger. Also I think that considering the importance of the issue even if you think that it is still express a minority view in the scientific community, you can not ingnore it. You can write like "These findings contrast sharply with the 2.3 to 4.5 degrees predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)" like did Earth.com when it wrote about it:

https://www.earth.com/news/atmospheric-co2-could-push-temperatures-much-higher-than-expected/

But I think you can not ignore it.

Especially as many scientists are consistently plaign that the warming is going faster than their models. This can explain it. If for example after the appearence of this study other scientists have said " that is false we do not agree" than it will be other thing. But I do not see an overall negative reaction to this study.

Except this study used more exact methode than previouse studies at least this is what is written in the earth.com:

" Invaluable resource for the study

The researchers used a 45-year-old drill core from the Pacific Ocean floor to gather their data. The core preserved organic matter due to the lack of oxygen, making it an invaluable source for studying historical climate conditions.

“I realized that this core is very attractive for researchers, because the ocean floor at that spot has had oxygen-free conditions for many millions of years,” said senior author Jaap Sinninghe Damsté, a scientist at NIOZ and professor of organic geochemistry at Utrecht.

The experts were able to construct a unique time series of CO2 levels over the past 15 million years from a single location, a feat that had not been achieved before.

They used the TEX86 method to determine past seawater temperatures, a technique developed at NIOZ 20 years ago that analyzes the chemical composition of archaea membrane lipids.

Additionally, they developed a new method to estimate past atmospheric CO2 concentrations using the chemical signatures of chlorophyll and cholesterol from algae. This approach is the first to use cholesterol for quantitative CO2 estimates and to apply chlorophyll data to this time period. "

So I think it should be mentioned. If you want, you can add that this is not what the IPCC think, that it is a small study and so on. Alexander Sauda/אלכסנדר סעודה (talk) 12:53, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

:The more extreme a statement is, the higher quality the source must be. This is quite an extreme statement, so a single primary study is not suited to this. WP:SCIRS gives more information. So much is published on this topic that we don't need to rely on primary sources really. They're are a few old primary sources in the article now that can be deleted instead. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 16:19, 8 July 2024 (UTC)