Articles by Grist staff

It's a Drought, It's a Flood … It's Superdisaster

The rising number of natural disasters brought on by climate change is seriously threatening developing countries, and more “superdisasters” are in the works as the world’s poor concentrate in ever more vulnerable places, according to a report released yesterday by the Red Cross. In the past six years, the number of people who needed aid […]

A Lung Time Coming

Nine Latin American cities, which together are home to some 68 million people, yesterday called for a regional alliance to fight smog. The cities’ senior environmental officials signed a declaration acknowledging that half the health problems in their urban areas are attributable to environmental degradation. The declaration also called on local authorities to take serious […]

Whodunnit? Wedunnit

Humans produced most of the gases that have eroded the Earth’s ozone layer, according to a study published in today’s issue of the journal Nature. A team of scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration took measurements of air trapped in polar snowpack in Greenland and Antarctica, showing for the first time that major […]

Clouding, the Issue

High-altitude clouds of ice crystals were spotted on Tuesday by scientists in Colorado and Utah, the farthest south such clouds have ever been seen in the Northern Hemisphere, suggesting that the same greenhouse gases that are warming Earth’s lower atmosphere are also chilling and adding water to the upper atmosphere. In other climate news, jet […]