Geoengineering is conspicuously absent from the IPCC’s report
For all its risks, it could help keep the planet cool
KNOWING WHAT is going on in the climate requires observations taken from high orbit, the ocean depths and all sorts of places in between, as well as models which stretch the powers of the most super supercomputers. Knowing what is going on as scientists and government representatives fine-tune the bit of an IPCC report on which governments officially sign off—the “summary for policymakers” (SPM)—is more akin to reading tea leaves. Was the removal of “fossil fuels” from one of its chart captions a pernicious, if petty, piece of petrostate obfuscation? Or just a way to make the technical definition involved sufficiently broad? It is hard to say if you were not in the room.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “It that cannot be named”
From the August 14th 2021 edition
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