Old news: CO₂ emissions. New hotness: Dust

A report in The Register on heating trends in the Atlantic Ocean reveals that airborne dust is a much greater factor than CO₂ in the atmosphere:

American scientists say that variations in atmospheric dust levels affect the temperature of the Atlantic ocean far more than global warming. Research indicates that 70 per cent of the change in Atlantic temperature over recent decades has resulted from reduced dust, rather than climate change.

The new analysis comes from scientists in the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Wisconsin. They say that the Atlantic temperature trend has been warmer by approximately a quarter of a degree each decade since 1980: but that most of this is actually because more sunlight is reaching the sea due to reducing levels of dirt in the air above it.

"A lot of this upward trend in the long-term pattern can be explained just by dust storms and volcanoes," says Amato Evan of Wisconsin uni. "About 70 percent of it is just being forced by the combination of dust and volcanoes, and about a quarter of it is just from the dust storms themselves."