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clipped from www.tnr.com Cross over San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, head north for half an hour, and you'll reach Mount Tamalpais State Park, home to redwood groves and, a little ways up, panoramic views of the bay. As it turns out, though, the park is also home to large amounts of pollution from Asia--dust, sulfur, trace metals--blowing in from across the Pacific. "We call it the persistent Asian plume," says Steven Cliff, an atmospheric scientist currently working with the California Air Resources Board. On some days, one-third of the state's background air pollution can be traced to Asia, and researchers are now looking into whether the plume could be disrupting cloud formation and rainfall in water-starved California. And China, which is building coal plants at a shocking rate of two per week, is now the world's largest source of greenhouse gases, emitting 14 percent more carbon dioxide than the United States in 2007.