Articles by Grist staff

The Nyet Set

Russian skeptics bet British scientist $10K that earth will cool Guess this counts as putting your money where your mouth is: Two Russian climate-change skeptics have bet a U.K. climate scientist $10,000 that the earth will cool over the next decade. Solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev believe that changes in sunspot activity are […]

Gloom and Doom Meets the Dismal Science

Economics the next big thing in green activism Green activists are increasingly embracing environmental economics, combining profit-oriented pragmatism with eco-idealism to make powerful cases for saving the environment. Although the field has been evolving for the past 40 or so years, activists really started to take note in the 1990s when a sulfur-dioxide emissions-trading program […]

Thirst-Case Scenarios

Shortages of safe water a growing global problem About 1.1 billion people worldwide can’t get clean drinking water and 2.4 billion lack access to basic sanitation, the International Herald Tribune reports in a series on the looming global problem of freshwater scarcity. The U.N. wants to halve these numbers by 2015, but current progress suggests […]

Born to Rewild

Conservationists propose bringing elephants to U.S., bears to U.K. Imagine: lions and elephants roaming free across the same Great Plains of the U.S. that their ancestors — big cats, mastodons, and mammoths — populated 13,000 years ago. That’s the “Pleistocene Park” vision that a group of conservation scientists proposed in the journal Nature last week. […]