"Do you think that over a century of discharging tons of smoke into the atmosphere has had, or will have, any effect?"

I mean, there's stuff in smoke, and it doesn't just float into space to turn into stars.

It's very easy to get bogged down in arguments about which SPECIFIC chemicals are causing which specific problems, and what specific effects that is having on the world as a whole.

But my thinking is, simply, it seems intuitive that SOMETHING results from pollution. If you pollute a river, the water is contaminated. If you have a landfill, that's ground full of trash. If I see a picture of a Chinese city covered in smog, the stuff in the air doesn't just wink out of existence when a breeze comes to blow it away. I don't need to debate about the consistency and cause of acid rain when it's obvious that acid rain exists.