Air pollution also causes more rain, changes rain from shallow to severe, and a large host of other effects. It's not simply "air pollution is preventing rain".
A simple example - for ~100 years mankind has used silver iodide to seed clouds to cause rain. Silver iodide would easily be called air pollution. [1]
Here's google scholar - note the large variety of rain and pollution interaction - and most certainly not as simple or negative as you post [2]
[1] "Daily precipitation records for 219 surface observing stations in the United States for the 42-year period 1951–1992 are investigated for weekly cycles in precipitation. Results indicate that neither the occurrence nor amount of precipitation significantly depends upon the day of the week"
[2] is a highly cited paper, has a good overview of the field, lots of papers, and certainly points out that the claims you're making are not considered statistically valid. They present ~2 dozen papers, show that some claim effect, some do not, rank them by statistical quality, and most interestingly, have a good summary table (Table 2). Use Sci Hub to read the paper. Table 2 makes it completely clear your claims are simply not warranted by the science. The rest of the paper reaches the same conclusion....
"The idea that it rains more on weekends because of weekday pollution is a myth." [3]
If you care to read the literature, you'd find these are not outlier papers. The effects are far more subtle, and much weaker statistically and evidentially, than you are claiming.
It's possible that in terms of volume of precipitation, urban areas get as much or more (https://www.udel.edu/udaily/2020/december/mather-lecture-mar....) but the point is the negative impact of human, preventing "good" soft rain, because those precipitation are more intense and rare, so it's causing erosion and the result is just like less precipitation for plants/trees
The top sentence on that search reads "There is no scientific evidence that it rains more often on weekends than on weekdays like Mondays. Weather is determined by a variety of complex atmospheric conditions that have nothing to do with the day of the week. However, the perception that it rains more often on weekends can be attributed to human bias"
I also just listed several decent studies meta studies summarizing a lot of the academic literature, and they seem quite in agreement that the situation is not as simple as you claim. In fact, the top several hits from your search are the studies I posted above.
Are you sure it's not the other way around? I remember reading Mondays have the sunniest weather because there's less pollution over the weekend.
And also from the article:
>In the sky, aerosol particles attract water vapor or ice. When the tiny wet globs get large enough, they become seeds for clouds. Half of Earth’s cloud cover forms around stuff like sand, salt, soot, smoke, and dust. The other half nucleates around vapors released by living things or machines, like the sulfur dioxide that arises from burning fossil fuels.
Sort of. Earthworms are a natural species in North America, but in the northern parts of the continent they were wiped out by glaciers ten to twenty thousand years ago.
The entire idea of invasive species is kind of fraught, because organisms migrate over time. Barren volcanic islands will become seeded with life. Past extinction events change the ecological dynamic. Technically, ocean life invaded the land hundreds of millions of years ago. Land bridges open up, continents collide or separate, etc. Humans weren't the only organism to migrate out of one continent onto others.
And the entire idea of species is kind of fraught because once we were all microorganisms?
No. Invasive species are relatively new to the land, they disturbe the existing equilibrium often without any natural predators to hunt them and they wreak havoc.
Like wild boars in USA. Like rabbits in Australia. Like humans on earth.
Barren islands evolved for tens of millions of years in isolation were all over the world until humans built ships.
I don't have the source, it was a few years ago, but there is a positive correlation between particulates and precipitation; however it can take several days for the effect to reach maximum "signal" and due to the movement of air masses the actual precipitation can happen some distance (possibly thousands of miles) from the source of particulates: if it rains (or doesn't rain) on the weekend for you, that might have some correlation to location of the source of particulates in your area.
A related effect would seem to be low sulfur fuel reducing ocean cloud cover (compared to previous fuel). I just saw an interactive map of a study using aircraft cruising altitude to impact cloud formation a few days ago.
> humans values are the bottom of this scale, just after mosquitoes
Aren't us humans almost exclusively a net negative, except for a small few? Meaning in most cases to Earth, it's best we didn't exist? We create pollution, waste, consume large amounts of resources that are only a net benefit in some cases to humans.
Now in a cosmic sense, maybe the Universe gains by having life - but who knows
65 million years ago an asteroid hit the earth, making untold species extinct and causing unimaginable climate change in the span of a few hours. Now, with humans on earth with telescopes and rockets and space-facing radar, we might stand a chance if it happens again. I’d say that counts for _something_.
Has any other life form on Earth protected another life form on Earth from extinction?
It seems like other life is spending 0 effort maintaining the environment, preventing the extinction of other species that are considered competitors for limited food and limited space.
While I don't disagree with these points, wouldn't this mean some small number like 0.0000001% of all of us humans over humanities entire existence are not a net negative?
In a ruthless way. Cuckoo birds have a mating strategy that would be immoral by human standards. As would that of the praying Mantis
All this is to say humans treat animals better than animals treat one another. We condemn cannibalism, rape and Necrophilia as natural species engage in it. If we observe that behavior in a zoo we actively prevent it. We impose that mortality upon them
humans is not even comparable, responsible of mass-extinction, biomass huge decrease, farm animals conditions are very enviable, captive animals (zoo, pets) neither
they're murdering insects everytime they take a 1.5 tonne vehicle for doing a few kilometers flat, and murdering many others indirectly through pollution, consumption, etc
For me the "value" of a tree is extremely high, as well as plants, insects, worms.., humans values are the bottom of this scale, just after mosquitoes