A lesson in geoengineering for grown-ups

A few days ago the European Union's Earth Observation programme, “Copernicus”, made a special announcement at the end of its monthly report on the state of the climate.

- Gwynne Dyer

It said that the average global temperature for the past three years (2023-2025) has been 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level. That's the level we were warned that we must never exceed."For November, global temperatures were 1.54C above pre-industrial," said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. “The three-year average for 2023-2025 is on track to exceed 1.5C for the first time.” Weirdly, the air-raid sirens did not go off. You couldn't imagine a worse emergency, but not even the fire sirens sounded.

In fact, most traffic was heading in the opposite direction. The United States is completing its withdrawal from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the second time). COP30, the annual conference on how well the world is doing at emissions cuts, made almost no progress in Brazil last month, and the final report didn’t even mention fossil fuels.