Latest Articles

A journey into the heart of industrial agriculture

  Americans live in a post-agricultural age. Today, fewer than two of every 100 U.S. citizens owe their living primarily to the land. A century ago, two of every five did. Yet even though very few of us contribute to food production, we all still eat — and food comes from somewhere. But where? In […]

A Grist special series on food and farming

You know where babies come from, sure — but do you know where Tater Tots come from? In this two-week series, we’ll take you on a behind-the-scenes tour of your very own diet. Everybody eats, every day, but we tend to gloss over the details. Things like the work that really goes into putting food […]

Green investment funds are taking off

Eco-friendly investment funds are sssssssssssmokin’!

Sorry, glacial thinning does not equal glacial growth

On Sunday, Bjørn Lomborg wrote:

And while the delegations first fly into Kangerlussuaq, about 100 miles to the south, they all change planes to go straight to Ilulissat -- perhaps because the Kangerlussuaq glacier is inconveniently growing.

But is it? I questioned this claim -- and asked readers for the relevant citation, which they provided. The key article from which he is drawing this claim is "Rapid Changes in Ice Discharge from Greenland Outlet Glaciers" from Science in March of this year. The article begins by noting ominously:

The recent, marked increase in ice discharge from many of Greenland's large outlet glaciers has upended the conventional view that variations in ice-sheet mass balance are dominated on short time scales by variations in surface balance, rather than ice dynamics. Beginning in the late 1990s and continuing through the past several years, the ice-flow speed of many tidewater outlet glaciers south of 72° North increased by up to 100%, increasing the ice sheet's contribution to sea-level rise by more than 0.25 mm/year. The synchronous and multiregional scale of this change and the recent increase in Arctic air and ocean temperatures suggest that these changes are linked to climate warming.

Organisms living in toxic waste pit may help fight cancer

Montana’s Berkeley Pit, containing 40 billion gallons of poisonous copper-mine runoff including arsenic, aluminum, cadmium, and zinc, has two claims to fame. One, it once killed a flock of hundreds of geese the moment they touched down on its surface. Two, the 40-billion-gallon pit houses 142 organisms — some of which have shown success in […]

A strategy for a no-nuclear, low-carbon, highly efficient, sustainable energy future

This came my way several weeks ago, but I ran across it again while hacking my way through my inbox and I thought it was worth sharing, particularly in light of the long list of endorsements. It comes from the Sustainable Energy Network, “a network of 450+ organizations, businesses, and individual advocates promoting aggressive deployment […]

Cities try to help bikers

USA Today says a few American cities are finally, at long last, taking steps to make life easier for bicyclists. This is heartening, I suppose, as far as it goes, but the measures under discussion — mainly bike lanes and some bike-sharing programs — are pretty wan. We’ve got a long, long way to go […]

What the ozone hole tells us about the science of climate change

The atmospheric sciences community is excitedly discussing new results that potentially cast doubt on our understanding of the chemistry of the Antarctic ozone hole. The ozone hole is formed when two molecules of chlorine monoxide react with each other to form what is known as the chlorine dimer, ClOOCl, and that molecule is subsequently blasted apart by sunlight to release the chlorine atoms. New results suggest that this reaction is actually much slower than previously suggested. If this is true, it suggests that there is some important chemical process destroying ozone in the Antarctic stratosphere that we do not know about.

In reaction to this unexpected scientific result, stratospheric chemists are attacking the problem, trying to think up potential mechanisms that reconcile these new measurements with everything else we know about the chemistry of the stratosphere. As a former stratospheric chemist, I can say that I have not seen this level of excitement in the stratospheric chemistry community in at least 10 or 15 years.

So what does this tell us about the science of climate change? It tells us that many of the criticisms of climate science coming from the skeptics are dead wrong.

Publisher will produce first eco-friendly Bible

Coming soon to a hotel room near you: the first green Bible, expected to hit the scene later this month from publisher Thomas Nelson. The Charles F. Stanley Life Principles Daily Bible — which perhaps includes the 11th commandment “Thou shalt be principled”? — will be certified by the Forest Stewardship Council and contain recycled […]

European Commission springs to action

For bluefin tuna to have any chance of survival, we've got to make sure proper legislation is in place to protect them and, more importantly, that it's enforced adequately and effectively.

With that in mind, it's a welcome sight to see the European Commission threatening countries like Italy and France with legal action for failing to adhere to fishing quotas and not accurately reporting catches.

The Commission's decision, though welcome, is long overdue.