AP: As climate talks drag on, more ponder techno-fixes (geoengineering)

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http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CLIMATE_BROKEN_TABOO

Dec 4, 7:08 AM EST

As climate talks drag on, more ponder techno-fixes

By CHARLES J. HANLEY
AP Special Correspondent

CANCUN, Mexico (AP) -- Like the warming atmosphere above, a once-taboo idea hangs over the slow, frustrating U.N. talks to curb climate change: the idea to tinker with the atmosphere or the planet itself, pollute the skies to ward off the sun, fill the oceans with gas-eating plankton, do whatever it takes.

As climate negotiators grew more discouraged in recent months, U.S. and British government bodies urged stepped-up studies of such "geoengineering." The U.N. climate science network decided to assess the options. And a range of new research moved ahead in America and elsewhere.

"The taboo is broken," Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric scientist, told The Associated Press.

Whatever the doubts, "we are amazingly farther up the road on geoengineering," Crutzen, who wrote a 2006 scientific article that sparked interest in geoengineering, said by telephone from Germany.

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