Air Pollution

In this midst of a record-setting fire season, Berkeley Earth’s climate scientists Robert Rhode and Zeke Hausfather talk with Social Media Manager Kari Hulac to discuss climate change and the fires burning across the West.

An earlier version of this article originally appeared on the Asthma Allergies Children website. By Liz Muller As I write this white ash is visible in the polluted San Francisco Bay Area air, wafting down from a smoky orange sky and into our lungs, a dangerous byproduct of wildfires burning more than 3 million acres […]

Horrific Air Pollution in Europe Reaches 7 cigarettes per day equivalent, a pack a day in India and China It’s winter, and that’s the worst air pollution period for Europe and China. The levels over much of the continent are in the unhealthy range. In the figure we show a map of the pollution of […]

by Zeke Hausfather Air pollution in China is a critical global health problem, responsible for somewhere between 700,000 and 2.2 million premature deaths annually. The largest single contributor to air pollution-related mortality is particulate matter below 2.5 microns in size, or PM2.5. Exposure to PM2.5 has been found to increase the risk of heart attacks, […]

by Richard A. Muller and Elizabeth A. Muller For many people, comparing air pollution to cigarette smoking is more vivid and meaningful than is citing the numbers of yearly deaths. When we published our scientific paper on air pollution in China in August 20151, we were surprised by the attention we got for a quick […]

Earlier this month the Shenyang EPA reported the worse levels of air pollution since record keeping began: Estimates varied between 1000 and 1400 micrograms per cubic meter of PM2.5— the fine particulate matter that has deadly health consequences. The US embassy in Shenyang reported “off the chart” recordings. In our recent study in PLOS on […]