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Take a walk, smell the roses. Any topic is fine, save people bashing.

I'll take sulfate aerosols for $1000, Alex

Sulfate aerosols reflect light back into space, and so contribute to global cooling. They are produced from SO2 released in the combustion of fossil fuels - the same SO2 that contributed to acid rain. Remember the push to clean up acid rain? It involved removing sulfur from emissions, which reduced the sulfate formation. No more acid rain, no more sulfate aerosol cooling. The cooling trend you're looking at corresponds to a dramatic surge in the use of fossil fuels (oil and coal) during and right after WWI.

And the blip in the early '80s was volcanic:

The years 1980, 1981, and 1982, for example, saw several major volcanic eruptions adding large quantities of particulate volcanic material and volatiles to the stratosphere, including the catastrophic eruption of Mount St. Helens, Washington, on May 18, 1980, and a large eruption of Mount Hekla, Iceland, on August 17, 1980. The 1982 series of eruptions from El Chichón volcano, Mexico, caused death and destruction in the populated area around the volcano, but a further reaching impact may result from the effect on Earth's climate because of the enormous ejection of volcanic material into the stratosphere.

And are you actually implying you see no statistical differences between the period 1976-2006 in that chart and any 30 year period that preceded it?



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