As you may or may not know, the IPCC is fond of making summaries. After disgorging one of their mammoth 3-part Assessment Reports they make summaries of each chapter plus a Summary for Policymakers (“SPM” to insiders) of the whole volume, and then a Technical Summary for each Working Group report, each of which in turn gets its own summary. And in case it’s not enough they then produce a Synthesis Report summing up all three volumes. Or rather a Full Volume Synthesis Report (which has its own SPM) and then a shorter, ah, summary version called the Longer Report. Why all these summaries of summaries? Presumably to make sure you can easily access all the information the IPCC considers vitally important. Or to gloss over any inconvenient truths for the benefit of alarmist journalists and politicians who want a simplistic and one-sided picture. Namely one which leaves out any awkward details about global greening or CO2 fertilization.

Seriously, neither of the synthesis reports, which together total 267 pages so it’s not as if there wasn’t space for it, mentions CO2 fertilization or global greening. Each one makes a brief mention of urban greening as a means of cooling down cities, it apparently being big news that it’s cooler in the shade. But the idea that there might be leafier trees and more shade with extra CO2 in the air earns no mention, nor any of the other findings from the enormous scientific literature on the subject showing all the ways plants benefit from higher CO2. But it’s not because the IPCC doesn’t know.

Of course they know. They just don’t want policymakers or members of the public to know, so they bury it deep in the back pages of the full reports. Which is where we will turn our attention next.