G'day Andrew,
2008/11/13 Jay Litwyn :
Since I believe in global warming and I see a contest between it
and
economics, I see a very hot dispute that really should be
off-loaded. There
are so many other places for volatile information to go. In other
words, if
someone did [[global warming]], I think they should expect to end
up on
another site, unless the article is restricted to history.
I think this is going to end in tears - where do we draw the line? Do we just not talk about global warming; do we talk about it as something that is believed to have happened up to and including last week; do we talk about it and imply it may continue to happen; do we talk about it in general terms in the future but give no numbers? I'm not sure this approach is helpful; it tries to deal with a small set of specific (percieved) problems by applying a draconian general rule. I mean, take cosmology. We'd be a shoddy encyclopedia if we didn't talk about the [[heat death of the universe]], a very well-known concept... but it's entirely hypothetical, it exists as a paper theory with some substantiating numbers, and it's several billion years ahead.
I seem to recall WP:CRYSTAL's original purpose was to stop people writing about predicted future events years before they occurred (e.g. [[Playstation 9]]). Actually, most examples I can think of come from computer games, film, or music. Call WP:CRYSTAL just one of many tools to defend against overwhelming geekgasm.
The point was to prevent Wikipedians from making predictions (Playstation 9 will come out in 2017, and it will be AWESOME!!!; Star Wars XVII will come out, and it will SUCK DONKEY BALLS!!!), not to stop us from reporting on others' predictions. So it's entirely appropriate to have an article on [[Heat death of the universe]], [[Global warming]], and even [[2012 London Olympics]]. Indeed, to ask the question --- is it appropriate to talk about global warming, heat death of the universe, whatever --- is to be elevating a badly-written policy above common sense. Again.