As a kid I remember the big catch phrases being acid rain, the ozone layer and, to a significantly lesser degree, global warming. I remember seeing pictures of perfect blue lakes where all the life had been killed off by acidification and being told that the hole in the ozone layer would mean that I'd need to wear SPF 8000 sunscreen when I grew up, unless we did something about it.
So far as I know we cleaned up emissions from cars and factories to combat acid rain, and it's been very effective. I'm not sure why anyone would've thought that scrubbing pollutants out of the air would affect global warming though. CO2 was never getting scrubbed out.
The air conditioner thing you're referring to had to do with CFCs, iirc. CFCs were the primary agent wrecking the ozone layer, punching holes in it over the Arctic and Australia, as well as other places (to lesser degrees).
Acid rain and ozone layer depletion were issues with proximate, easily identifiable and fixable causes. Rain pH, pollutant content and ozone layer thickness are all very easy to measure and demonstrate, compared to global warming. It's difficult to pretend that these are the result of natural oscillations in the climate.