Articles by Grist staff

Film plot rings true as NOAA runs up against White House

The brewing storm. Image: NOAA. Even after grapefruit-sized hail and monster tornadoes assault major cities in the Northern Hemisphere in the film The Day After Tomorrow, Jack Hall, a paleoclimatologist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, still can’t get the ballooning crisis of global warming through the thick skull of the vice president. “I […]

10 Things I Haiti About You

Deforestation in Haiti Increases Flood Danger More than 90 percent of the country of Haiti is deforested. If you think that’s depressing, consider that the lack of trees to hold soil in place has left Haiti’s rural residents vulnerable to periodic floods in which torrential rainwater tumbles down mountains, picking up gravel and boulders that […]

Punch-drunk Lovelock

Famed Ecologist Argues Nuclear Power Needed to Fight Global Warming A prominent ecologist is raising a ruckus in environmental circles by arguing that the world needs to immediately embrace nuclear energy if it’s to have any chance of combating climate change. James Lovelock, the U.K. scientist whose Gaia Hypothesis — that the earth itself is […]

Mighty Morphin’ Coal-power Rangers

NAFTA Commission Critical of Coal-Fired Power Plants Overall pollution in North America declined by 10 percent from 1998 to 2001 (the last year for which figures are available), but coal-fired power plants continue to lag behind other sources in the pace of improvement and in reducing the total amount of pollution, according to a new […]