After World War II, the global economy revved up fast and strong. Part of the reason for this rapid industrialization was the need to rebuild war-torn countries and cities, and also to build housing and infrastructure for the burst in population that followed the war.
The energy for this industrial accelaration was coal -- dirty coal, loaded with sulfur. London was famous for killer fogs in the '50s, but the problem was worldwide. And what the sulfur made was sulfur aerosols in the atmosphere, and they caused a slight global cooling period, which famously became the global cooling "scare" that the current crop of climate change skeptics and their bad brood ilk, climate change deniers (I think they should be grouped differently, because one group is misinformed and the group peddles disinformation) continue to misunderstand and/or promote.
This article is not about that. This article examines the question of whether the smoke from all the burning cities near the end of the war could have caused some climate cooling in the year of 1945 and a couple subsequent.
Did Smoke From City Fires in World War II Cause Global Cooling?
You could read the abstract at that link if you want to, but the bottom line (literally, from the abstract) is:
"Although the climate record is consistent with an expected 0.1–0.2 K cooling, because of multiple uncertainties in smoke injected to the stratosphere, solar radiation observations, and surface temperature observations, it is not possible to formally detect a cooling signal from World War II smoke."
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