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Responding to a draft version of an upcoming IPCC report on climate change mitigation obtained and reported on by
Reuters on Wednesday, former US vice president and well known climate change activist Al Gore says that any plans to execute “geoengineered” solutions to global warming are “insane, utterly mad and delusional in the extreme.”

Though the draft IPCC report, as presented by
Reuters, does not seem to advocate strongly for some of the most outrageous proposed schemes, the report does say that the inability of the world’s governments to reduce emissions will necessitate more aggressive and pro-active measures in the future to avoid the global temperature increases the scientists are now predicting.

As the
Guardian‘s Suzanne Goldenberg reports:

The UN climate panel, in the next edition of its blockbuster reports, will warn that governments might have to extract vast amounts of greenhouses gases from the air by 2100 to limit climate change, according to a draft copy of the report seen by Reuters.

But the former vice president of the US said that searches for an instant solution, which he said were born of desperation, were misguided and could lead to an even bigger catastrophe.

“The idea that we can put a different form of pollution into the atmosphere to cancel out the effects of global warming pollution is utterly insane,” he told a conference call for South African reporters.

He added: “The fact that some scientists who should know better are actually engaged in serious discussion of those alternatives is a mark of how desperate some of them are feeling due to the paralysis in the global political system.”

Long a fixation for some, a multitude of geoengineering schemes have been floated based on the idea that if human interference (ie. widespread industrial and carbon pollution) has caused the planet to warm, some kind of additional human interference with nature can reverse the trend.