Ok which is it people?

I've read this article twice and I'm pretty sure I understand what it is saying but it leave me really confused. I thought that aerosol pollutants were a bad thing. My grandmother had horrible hair days once they changed her aqua-net hairspray to a pump spray. She suffered so much at the hands of the CFC police.

air pollution good for the earth

just in case you don't feel like reading the whole thing here's the kicker...

"Aerosols offset approximately 50 percent of the greenhouse gas warming," Knut Alfsen, research director at the Centre for International Environmental Research in Oslo, Norway, said by phone.

Without this particle pollution, he said, average global surface temperatures would have increased by 1.0 to 1.1 Celsius (1.8 to 2.0 Fahrenheit) since the start of industrialisation, rather than 0.7 C (1.25 F).

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that average global temperatures will rise before 2100 by 1.1 to 6.4 C (2.0 F to 11.5 F), depending on efforts to curb the gases that drive global warming.

Any increase above 2.0 C, the panel said, would unleash a maelstrom of human misery, including drought, famine, disease and forced migration.

To stay below that threshold, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere must be kept below 450 parts per million (ppm). The current level is about 385 ppm.

"As we continue to clean up the air -- which we must do for the sake of human health -- the challenge of avoiding dangerous climate change through reductions in CO2 emissions will be even harder," said Peter Cox, a researcher at Britain's University of Exeter and a co-author of the Nature study."