Re: Does the smoke from smokestacks make other clowds?

Smoke and clouds are not the same. Smoke is tiny little grains of solid stuff, like dirt or chalk-dust or ashes (only smaller) which hang in the air. Clouds are made of tiny little drops of water. Clouds form when "water vapor", an invisible sort of water mixed in with the air, gets cold and turns into little water drops floating in the air. Steam is the same thing.

However, many smokestacks don't make much smoke. Instead, they give off carbon dioxide (an invisible gas which forms when you burn things) and water vapor. Usually, the "smoke" you see coming out of a smokestack is actually steam.

I sometimes see a smokestack which doesn't have any steam coming out, but high in the air above it there's a little cloud which floats above the smokestack, at the same height as the other clouds in the sky. This happens when the invisible water vapor rises from the smokestack until it gets high up where the air is cold, and turns into cloud drops.

So yes, smokestacks can sometimes make ordinary clouds. But it's the water vapor, not the smoke, that causes it.

[Moderator note: It is possible that smoke particles can help water vapor to condense into the visible droplets that we see as clouds. The smoke could seed or catalyse cloud formation.]