Talk:Carbon footprint

message: I feel parts of this article stray too much into more general aspects of climate change better left to other articles. In particular, the sections on "Causes" (Carbon_footprint#Causes) and "Rise in greenhouse gas over time" (Carbon_footprint#Rise_in_greenhouse_gas_over_time) might be better left to Greenhouse gas emissions?? There's obvious duplication/repetition, it's not clear (to me) why these topics should be covered under a more specific article about carbon footprints or why readers would expect to find this info here? 45154james (talk) 17:26, 13 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with you. I used the tool "who wrote that" and found that these two sections were added as a result of a merger in 2021, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=962213662&diffmode=source They were moved by User:Chidgk1. I think they need to be culled and integrated better into the article. I am tempted to just delete them. Especially this section can just be deleted, it's anyway out of date by now: "Rise in greenhouse gas over time". EMsmile (talk) 09:39, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: When I merge articles I merge the lot and perhaps delete some later. This is so that other people can more easily revert if they want to. But often I don’t delete very much but leave it to others who know better than me. So go ahead as you wish Chidgk1 (talk) 11:01, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text:  Makes sense. Thanks. @User:45154james do you have time to do this clean-up? I think it would be very good. EMsmile (talk) 17:00, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text:  I've briefly reviewed the "Causes" section and I see nothing here that isn't already adequately covered in Greenhouse gas emissions. One sentence looks helpful in the context of carbon footprints, so I moved that further up the page. Also I kept the photo of the power plant and moved that higher up. Then I deleted the remainder of "Causes". Some of the info just looks very out-of-date and wrong - e.g. the info about Methane emissions is contradicted by the info on Greenhouse gas emissions. That leaves the section on "Rise in greenhouse gas over time" to review. The chart looks like it might have a useful home elsewhere, if not here. 45154james (talk) 18:32, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I've moved the chart further up the page so it illustrates the point about aviation. Also deleted the "Rise in greenhouse gas over time" , which dates from 2010, 2014, and 2017 and is covered better (newer info, more detail) by Greenhouse gas emissions. 45154james (talk) 07:14, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks. Looking at this article overall, I think it needs further culling. It overlaps with Greenhouse gas emissions also in the sections on carbon footprint by sector and ways of reducing carbon footprint. At the end of the day, carbon footprint is just a fancy/popular term for  Greenhouse gas emissions ... so we have to think carefully about what should be contained in this article exactly. EMsmile (talk) 09:17, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

text: I agree with what user 45154james said above, that the article should gather more information pertaining to specific cause and effects of the changing carbon footprint . For example the article could mention how the increase in carbon effect the temperature of the earth, which in turn effects calving of major glaciers. These massive calving events lead to a change in the composition of our oceans, causing the salinity levels to change. It would be interesting to have the article talk about how this directly effects the entire earth. Logan T. Jones (talk) 20:55, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
replies: text:  No, we have other articles that cover this already, e.g. effects of climate change. Each Wikipedia article just shines the spotlight on one particular aspect; each Wikipedia article is like a small chapter; the one on carbon footprint cannot cover everything that there is to know about climate change and shouldn't even try to do that. Too much overlap between Wikipedia articles is a problem. EMsmile (talk) 22:13, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Too much overlap with [[Greenhouse gas emissions]] 

message: Update: User:ASRASR has recently added the edits that were sent to us by by Vivienne Reiner by e-mail and also added his own content and refs, I believe. @User:ASRASR perhaps you could briefly summarise the major changes that came out of this round of editing?
: I've also made some changes to the article today. I have restructured it a bit. I wanted to move the content that is specific to carbon footprinting (e.g. the critique section), to the front of the article, and leave the part that is not unique and that is identical to content at greenhouse gas emissions, climate change mitigation and so forth to the second half of the article. There might be even scope for further condensing here. 
: Some further comments:
* It seems to me that the content about Scope 1, 2 and 3 is a bit repetitive. I am not sure if it really fits so well under "definitions" or should be moved to "calculations". (update: I have changed that now)
* Can we come up with better images for carbon footprint? I feel that we have a lot of images and graphs about GHG emissions which again seems to imply that carbon footprint = GHG emissions but doesn't make it clear why it's its own Wikipedia article that is unique.
* I have taken out a few mentions of "new" and "recent" and "now" as those words will age quickly if they are not specified with a particular year.
* I have changed terms to italics rather than quotation marks.
* The section on "calculations" still seems a bit messy and the logical flow is missing a bit. (update: I've re-arranged these sections a bit but it's still not great) EMsmile (talk) 13:31, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: Update in June 2023

message: I've just changed the definition section a bit to achieve a more logical flow (I hope). It seems that the current IPCC definition only includes CO2 and is based on a publication from 2008. It seems to me though that more commonly nowadays several GHGs are included in carbon footprint though (I hesitate to say "all"). So I've changed it around a bit to reflect that. The definition from 2011 would now be the more prominent one (comes first in that section). Maybe we could add some more references about this if this has been described like this in the literature somewhere. EMsmile (talk) 13:26, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Changes to the definition section 

message: I've just completed another round of improvements where I tried to make it all a bit clearer, less academic and with more examples that people can understand. I plan to take a little break now from editing this article, although I will be contacting also some further reviewers for comment. Overall, I think it's still not great but far better than before. Some of the sections still suffer from academic language and low readability scores but I am currently not able to improve on those (as I am undecided what is important and what is not). If anyone can help, please do!
Also, here are some comments I got from Christian Berg last week which I have already addressed/incorporated now. Note, the text below was translated from German to English by Deepl so won't be perfect English:
 +++
To your questions I will first write an assessment and then you / we can consider whether and how to incorporate it. 
Ad 1: the problem with ecological externalities is, after all, that economic activities cause damage to nature for which no one pays (whether that is the case in the Art. Carb. Foot. has to be explained, I am not sure, rather skeptical). After all, there are quite different kinds of environmental damages, which are mostly (also) shown by damages to the environmental media (water, soil, air). The idea of quantifying these damages in some way is ultimately in the background of the question about the Carb. Footprint - BUT the CF is just one, today very common, but very limited view on things. 
There were already other concepts in the 90s: For example that of the ecological backpack (https://www.nachhaltigkeit.info/artikel/schmidt_bleek_mips_konzept_971.htm) or the ecological footprint https://www.nachhaltigkeit.info/artikel/kologischer_fussabdruck_733.htm , (https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/ecological-footprint/ or also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint). 
Ad 2: Maybe you could write after an introduction/general classification, as just tried, that the climate crisis is one of the most discussed ecological crises of our time (there are countless sources writing this - if necessary also in distinction to underrepresented topics like BioDiv or material cycles).There have been political efforts for a very long time, the IPCC, the Kyoto Protocol, Paris etc..And for it, unlike other crises, it is true that there is (more or less) ONE indicator, CO2 eqiv, describing the situation. Moreover, almost all economic activities are associated with GHG emissions. 
This all illustrates why the GHG/Carbon Footprint has become such an important metric. BUT this should not make us forget that it is "only" about carbon. So BioDiv, toxicity, land degradation, etc. all don't enter into it. 
Ad 3: First of all, I have to say that I am not a CF expert either. But in my opinion, it is first important to distinguish what you are looking at: a company, a product, a country ....? As the name suggests, the LIFE-cycle assessment LCA / ecobalance is oriented towards a product. Therefore, ISO 14067 and PAS 2050 have the product in mind (https://www.iso.org/standard/71206.html ). The World Resources Institute (WRI) with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (wbcsd) had developed the Greenhouse Gas Protocol with its 3 scopes coming from a business perspective. These are simply different perspectives, in that they complement each other. Complicating matters further, LCA standards such as ISO 14067 are proprietary...  EMsmile (talk) 10:28, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Improvements in July 

message: So if I understand the article right:
the carbon footprint of a country includes its upstream emissions but not its downstream emissions
the carbon footprint of an organisation includes both its upstream and downstream emissions
the carbon footprint of a person includes their upstream emissions but not their downstream emissions
1) Did I understand right?
2) if I understood right should we say this explicitly? 
3) if I understood right then why is the scope different for organisations than people and countries? Maybe the downstream emissions of most people (Satoshi Nakamoto being an exception) are negligable? Maybe no one actually talks about the carbon footprint of a country and if so should we remove countries from the article? If not then why account organisations differently to countries?
Chidgk1 (talk) 19:45, 10 February 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think that is correct. Does it say so in the article? My understanding is that carbon footprint tries to include everything, i.e. upstream and downstream for everything (countries, orgs, products, people). But in practice, I think carbon footprint makes most sense for products, and perhaps for organisations. But not really for people (other than them being the consumers of the products...). And I also wouldn't really use it for countries. For countries we call it "per capita GHG emissions", don't we? Or perhaps some people equate the "per capita GHG emissions" of a country to its footprint... Either way, if this doesn't come out clearly in the article we need to improve on that. (with suitable sources). I was involved in writing a lot of this article, together with an external expert from Sydney. But some of the content seems a bit academic/theoretical to me. So it could do with an overhaul if someone has time! EMsmile (talk) 22:04, 10 February 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: As far as | know “per capita GHG emissions” do not include downstream. To avoid confusion I propose that all mention of countries is removed from this article and a hatnote added referring the reader to Greenhouse gas inventory for discussion of countries. Chidgk1 (talk) 10:41, 11 February 2024 (UTC)
replies: text:  This sounds OK to me but I just don't know if the literature supports this. I have the feeling that in the literature, carbon footprint is also used for countries. Or perhaps the term is thrown around so freely that it's hard to decide what's what... EMsmile (talk) 22:08, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Difference between country, organisation and person? 

message: Over the course of the next many weeks I will be making frequent and bold edits as well as engaging with the Talk Page and the community around this article. I am editing as a part of a Technical Editing Class and am excited to do some reading and contributing. I will be making edits in line with organization, structure, cleaning up, and just making sure things make sense. I have already made a few suggestions and am excited to hear some feedback. Nickleback007 (talk) 17:55, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Welcome to Wikipedia but please don't be too bold, given that you are a newbie and a student. Best to discuss your proposed changes on the talk page first. Many of us experienced editors are happy in theory when students are contributing to Wikipedia articles but in practice, a lot of their edits have to be undone because the students don't follow the rules properly or are not adding value (e.g. by using outdated references, too many primary sources, not secondary sources etc.). I find it particularly frustrating when the student's lecturers/professors make no effort in mopping up / checking the student's work but leaving that all up to the community. So please make only small incremental changes to start with and use the talk page a lot. EMsmile (talk) 18:33, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I am excited to join this GLOBAL community of editors from all walks of life and varied levels of experience! It's so exciting to contribute to the Wikipedia Editor's mission to "Make Bold Edits"! As I mentioned I won't be adding content, just cleaning up. Your concern is noted! Thanks for the welcome! Nickleback007 (talk) 17:40, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Editing in Class 

message: — Assignment last updated by Mollyabell1 (talk) 18:40, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: Small Group Communication