Geoengineering is conspicuously absent from the IPCC’s report

KNOWING WHATIPCCSPMIPCCSPMSPM 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 on which governments officially sign off—the “summary for policymakers” ()—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.And what to make of things that didn’t make it to the summary in the first place—such as solar geoengineering, which the refers to as “solar-radiation modification”? In the of the previous report, in 2013, this approach to climate change, which involves modifying the atmosphere to boost the amount of sunlight reflected back to space, was deemed to “have the potential to substantially offset a global temperature rise”. The body of the new report agrees, finding that research has consistently shown such methods “could offset some of the effects of increasing greenhouse gases on global and regional climate, including the carbon and water cycles”. But this time round there is no discussion in the .