Now apparently even clean air causes global warming. Originally from an Op-Ed in the LA Times we read about….

As much of the world marked Earth Day this past week, the Environmental Protection Agency reported that air pollution has declined dramatically over the past 20 years. It sounds like good news, but science writer Eli Kintisch argues that there’s a surprising downside: Cleaner air might actually intensify global warming.

From the original Op-Ed, “If we continue to cut back on smoke pouring forth from industrial smokestacks, the increase in global warming could be profound,” Kintisch writes. Which basically means that:

Kintisch isn’t talking about greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide; he’s talking about another kind of pollutant we put in the sky — “like aerosols from a spray can,” he tells NPR’s Guy Raz. “It turns out that those particles have a profound effect on maintaining the planet’s temperature.”

So, first aerosols were useful, then they were bad, and now they are useful again. Do keep up.

Which means government taxpayer-funded approval for:

injecting new pollutants into the stratosphere while we continue to clean up our emissions.

Makes sense. Pollution is a good thing if the government does it with taxpayers’ money but is bad when it is a byproduct of productive activity. That’s why Kintisch wants to put “gunk, essentially, up in the upper atmosphere” because “some scientists think we’re getting near that worse-case scenario right now.”

Okay, if you’ve caught up now, this all means that because there has been no warming for the past 15 years, we must all panic.

TheEye will do his bit and turn the heating on tonight. Or off.