Don't know much about it, thanks for the recap.

I've noticed before that Wikipedia articles on sensitive topics tend to become a delicately negotiated compromise between a number of active contributors a number of years ago, which is then basically frozen with all attempts to significantly alter it one way or the other reversed. The problem being that those contributors weren't necessarily representative to begin with, so the version being carefully preserved can in some cases be far from a balanced representation of the academic debate, and become even less so as new elements appear which aren't included.

Though it's not that easy to see how they could handle things in a better way, without violating the general idea of an encyclopedia to which everyone can contribute. Generally speaking, I mean, not for this topic in particular.

I first came across this kind of thing in college when writing a paper about Haifa during the war of 1948, and the events leading up to it. The debates between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian historians in academic articles sometimes break down into not just strongly worded rejections and attacks, but direct personal insults. Kind of interesting to see things like that in supposedly scientific journals.

The difference, perhaps, is that in that case both camps have considerable resources on their side, at least on a global level even if there may be a strong bias in one direction or the other in individual countries. So you don't really get a dominant narrative crushing dissent, you just get two (or really more than two) clashing camps, where even historians who aim for neutrality find it almost impossible to avoid being drawn or pushed towards the one or the other side.

It does produce wine from what I can find, but it's mentioned as a recent and fairly small-scale thing.

The thing about the global warming controversy, for me, is that a lot of the most charged debate is on points which, practically speaking, don't matter all that much. Comparing to previous points in Earth's lifetime, for instance - yeah, temperatures and CO2 concentrations have been much higher in the past than now. Perhaps it's true that global warming isn't entirely anthropogenic, with things like solar cycles playing a role as well.

But surely the basic point is very simply that Earth is rapidly warming now with climate patterns shifting. It certainly won't destroy the planet, or even wipe out humanity, but it will dramatically affect agricultural production in many places, water availability, and even the existence of whole islands and stretches of coastline (even if it may also create new opportunities in other places - such as the wine in Norway). And that cutting back CO2 emissions will at least slow down those trends, which is a lot more feasible than just letting it happen and solving all the resulting problems separately. Because that would involve challenges to the tune of resettling hundreds of millions if not billions of people, and in addition to the staggering costs involved, it seems somewhat optimistic to imagine that this could be done in a non-violent way.

True, though there are different gradations - on politically neutral topics like physics, you still have the 'political' dynamics which you described, where new ideas and perspectives may be discouraged by the established authors who want to defend their career's work. But that's just internal politics, and doesn't threaten to bias the outcomes too much in the longer run. Unlike the topics which are politically charged, or become so due to their ramifications on existing debates.

You can look at it optimistically and say that with the internet and the democratization of information through Wikipedia and the like, it's become easier for people to see and promote the existence of multiple different viewpoints on topics whereas a few decades they would've just heard the one dominant take, unless they were really closely involved. But on the downside, most people don't really have all that much time to spend on thoroughly investigating all sides of a topic, or inclination to, so they often just pick a side and ignore all others. Being skeptical is a good thing, as long as you're consistent about it and not only applying it to 'the other side', I'd say.