Several Southern California communities, including Riverside, are being hit with smoke from the huge Line Fire in the San Bernardino Mountains, creating what the Environmental Protection Agency classifies as “very unhealthy” air quality. UC Riverside experts on environmental pollution describe what we’re breathing, how long the airborne particles are likely to stick around, and what...
Using a new detection method, UC Riverside scientists found a massive amount of methane, a super-potent greenhouse gas, coming from wildfires — a source not currently being accounted for by state air quality managers. Methane warms the planet 86 times more powerfully than carbon dioxide over the course of 20 years, and it will be...
University of California scientists have a new way to demonstrate which neighborhoods returned to pre-pandemic levels of air pollution after COVID restrictions ended. Vehicle emissions are the biggest source of carbon dioxide in Southern California’s air. As people drove their cars far less in 2020 compared to 2019 due to the pandemic, there was a...
"Dairy farms produce large amounts of two things: milk and poop. Milk finds its way into delicacies like hot cocoa and grilled cheese sandwiches but the poop just piles up. Dairy farmers bulldoze the mess into artificial ponds called manure lagoons, where anaerobic microbes break it down into methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Methane traps...
