Brown cloud "accelerates global warming" (but also slows it down)

Here's an article that goes to show the lengths that alarmist UN will go to in order to keep the AGW bandwagon rolling, as reported in The Australian:

A THICK brown cloud of soot, particles and chemicals stretching from the Persian Gulf to Asia threatens the world's health and food supplies, the UN said yesterday, describing it as the newest threat from global warming.

These "brown clouds," caused by the burning of fossil fuels, wood and plants, play a significant role in exacerbating the effects of greenhouse gases in warming up the Earth's atmosphere, the report said.

"Imagine for a moment a 3km-thick band of soot, particles, a cocktail of chemicals that stretches from the Arabic Peninsula to Asia," said Achim Steiner, UN undersecretary general and executive director of the UN program.

We'll skate over the fact that "global warming" stopped in 2001... But these brown clouds are very cunning, because not only do they make global warming worse, they also slow it down - miraculously both at the same time. And there was me thinking it was just the natural climate cycles demonstrating once and for all that anthropogenic CO2 has little effect on global temperature. Silly me. Of course, global warming is still rampaging through the planet, it's just that its effects are being hidden by the brown clouds.

The phenomenon complicates the climate change scenario globally because the brown clouds also help cool the Earth's surface and "masks" the impact of global warming by an average of 40 per cent, the study said.

The ever impartial and totally un-political UN is now clutching at straws to explain why the planet simply won't co-operate and warm up like an oven as the projections of the IPCC's hopelessly incomplete and simplistic climate models say it should.

All of which leads to the inevitable conclusion, namely that we should "do something, quick":

"All of this points to an even greater and urgent need to look at emissions across the planet because this is where the stories are linked in terms of greenhouse emissions and particle emissions and the impact that they're having on our global climate."

If the science of global warming is so settled, as we are continually told, why does this kind of story come as such a surprise to everybody? Put bluntly, it simply rams home the point that the science is far from settled, the debate ain't over, and in fact the climate is even less understood than we suspected. Even the UN, with its band of alarmist scientists, doesn't really have a clue what is going on in the atmosphere.

Read it here.