Pirate's Cove

The True Believers trotted this one out a few weeks ago, saying that China’s pollution was masking what Mankind is doing. Apparently, they’ve decided that they are going to work this one to death

Stratospheric Pollution Helps Slow Global Warming

Despite significant pyrotechnics and air travel disruption last year, the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull simply didn’t put that many aerosols into the stratosphere. In contrast, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, put 10 cubic kilometers of ash, gas and other materials into the sky, and cooled the planet for a year. Now, research suggests that for the past decade, such stratospheric aerosols—injected into the atmosphere by either recent volcanic eruptions or human activities such as coal burning—are slowing down global warming.

And then we have

The world is getting progressively warmer, and the vast majority of evidence points to greenhouse gases spewed into the atmosphere by humans — carbon dioxide (CO2), especially — as the main culprit. But while the buildup of greenhouse gases has been steadily increasing, the warming goes in fits and starts. From one year to the next it might get a little warmer or a lot warmer, or even cooler.

That’s because greenhouse gases aren’t the whole story. Natural variations in sunlight and ocean currents; concentrations of particles in the air, manmade and otherwise; and even plain old weather variations can speed the warming up or slow it down, even as the underlying temperature trend continues upward. And while none of those factors is likely to change that trend over the long haul, scientists really want to understand how they affect projections of where our climate is heading.

and

For years now, environmental scientists have puzzled over a peculiarity of global warming: From 1998 to 2008, while the production of warming greenhouse gases increased, the temperature of the earth’s surface didn’t budge. Now Robert Kaufmann, a College of Arts & Sciences professor and chair of the department of geography & environment, has found an explanation: sulfur particles, emitted mainly from coal-burning power plants in Asia, have reflected so much solar energy away from the earth that they mitigated the warming influence of the greenhouse gases.

Got that? The premise is that anthropogenic global warming is real, but, nature and man masked the effects of the catastrophe. What they have done is attempt to create a condition where they explain away the flat temps since the great El Nino of 1998, and still blame mankind and prop up their dying cult.