Aerosol Removal and Solar Decline Drive Post-1980 Surface Warming Acceleration

Standard climate models do not fully reproduce post-1980 surface warming acceleration. Two forcing pathways explain the gap: Western clean air legislation progressively removed industrial sulphate aerosols from 1980 onward, unmasking suppressed greenhouse warming; and the Sun's magnetic output declined secularly after 1980, partially offsetting that unmasking. We quantify both using MERRA-2 sulphate aerosol optical depth records for four industrial regions, a first-principles radiative transfer calculation of aerosol forcing efficiency (RE = −25 W/m²/AOD), and a PMOD/NNLSSI2 composite solar irradiance record with 11-year cycle smoothing. North American and European sulphate AOD fell 53% and 67% respectively over 1980–2020, contributing +0.162 W/m² of net warming. The solar secular decline contributed −0.169 W/m² of cooling. Together with greenhouse gas forcing (+1.500 W/m², validated against IPCC AR6 to within 1.3%), these terms form a five-term Resultant Radiative Imbalance Curve (RRIC) of +1.493 W/m² at 2020. The RRIC predicts +0.747°C of warming from 1980, matching HadCRUT5 observations of +0.740°C to within 0.007°C — a result that present GHG-only frameworks do not achieve at this temporal resolution. Extended to 2075 under SSP2-4.5 and SSP3-7.0, the framework projects Paris 1.5°C threshold crossings between 2030 and 2037. Models that ignore aerosol unmasking and solar secular decline do not simply underperform — they misread the physical structure of post-1980 warming.