About pollution from smoke or animal p--p.?

In London in 1952 they had a weather event where an inversion trapped air over the city. This caused smog so strong that it killed 4000 people! I remember it being called the Killer Fog, but I looked it up and on Wikipedia it's The Great Smog of London.

This was caused by people burning coal in their fireplaces, which apparently was extremely common in London, coal being very cheap and central heating apparently having not been introduced yet to Great Britain.

But, like every person in London who burned coal must have said "What damage can I do by burning a couple pounds of coal every night? I mean, like only when it's freezing in the Winter or, this being England, when it's freezing in the Summer?"

Yes, in the time before the Industrial Revolution (another English product, BTW) people knew that their own smoke and poop was minimal compared to natural smoke and poop. But since then we have graduated to become the primary causes of smoke and poop.

Dog poop in the park is probably not that serious of a health hazard. People get upset when they step in it, and they worry about their kids playing in grass, rolling around in it, where little doggie turd-bombs are hiding. Buffalo poop (and much more, cow poop) eventually break down and fertilize the soil, but even then if you walked across the prairies you had to look where you stepped.

But smoke is different. There's more smoke in the air now than ever before, and we can actually correlate this 'particulate' matter with a higher incidence of respiratory diseases. We've been using the atmosphere as a garbage dump as long as we've been around but we realize now we can't do that forever.

And there are other bad things in smoke. CO2 is relatively benign, I mean we all breathe it out and it accumulates in a closed car or even an office. A rise of only a few parts per million of CO2 in our atmosphere is definitely changing our climate worldwide. The highest it ever was in 800 million years was 300 parts per million but now it's over 400 parts. It's risen steadily from 300 to 400 since 1975 and that trend is not going to stop just by itself.

Global warming deniers point to every forest fire and volcano and insist the majority of the air pollution comes from -them-, but that's just not true. As our population grows we make more and more, and now we make the majority of it. And, of course, the population is not through growing yet, is it?

When my grandparents were kids during the Great Depression they cooked their food on burning cow pies.