Mark Buchanan — who is actually a physicist, after all — makes a compelling argument against relying on geo-engineering to deal with our climate change problem. For one thing, some of the proposed technologies simply won’t work, because they do nothing about the fact that the poles are warming faster than the rest of the planet. For another, the geo-engineering fairy is being used to lobby against other approaches — conservation and renewable energy sources — that would deal with climate change at its source.