Jason Box has an update on arctic changes from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, which is a project of the Arctic Council.
Starts with a bunch of very small graphs, but don’t get discouraged, he focuses on each one full screen as the talk goes on. Less than 20 minutes and a thorough, if sobering, update.
We’re about to send young soldiers into a battlefield that they are as ill prepared for as the mounted cavalry regiments that charged machine gun nests in World War I.
The world leaders in drone warfare are the Ukrainians, but Iran has been supplying, modifying and improving their own drones, with Russian help, for at least half a decade. Maybe we should stop insulting Kyiv, and start learning from them.
Fox News report. This realization is slowly sinking into American media.
PBS Newshour below.
Continue reading “Drones Warfare is a Paradigm Shift that the US has Been Sleeping On”Climate change has some say in this fight.
From the Arizona Republic.
“I’ve had an old rancher friend tell me once, …if you ever sell off your cattle with the intention of starting up again…it never happens.”
Wildfires are ripping across the Great Plains, and other flare-ups are popping up in Arizona and Colorado remarkably early in the season. Firefighters and experts are watching these giant red splotches of burning forest and grasslands with alarm, warning that the timing, ingredients fueling their startling growth, and what they signal about the fire season ahead is a recipe for concern — perhaps signaling an expanding frontier for fire risk in broader patches of the western half of the United States.
“To sum it up,” Pete Curran, a staff meteorologist for Watch Duty, a nonprofit that tracks wildfires live and sends updates to users in real time, and former captain at the Orange County Fire Authority, put it bluntly: “We are scared s—less.”
“To have any fire that goes hundreds of thousands of acres in a day anywhere is very unusual at any time of the year, let alone in mid-March,” he added about the blazes in Nebraska. “It got everyone’s attention.”
Many fire-prone parts of the country did not get a real, substantial winter, one that typically leaves mountains and soil with a solid snowpack to help cushion the transition into unrelenting summer heat. Combine that with the kind of dry cold fronts that brought powerful fire-igniting winds in late February in the Oklahoma Panhandle and southern Kansas; an unprecedented heat dome parked over a slew of states from California to the Great Plains that brought the country’s highest-ever March temperature; and wildfire crews already stretched thin. Meteorologists, climate scientists and firefighters who monitor such activity closely are already calculating how they can spread their resources across regions if these kinds of fires begin to pop off simultaneously.
Not just tallying damages, naming, blaming and shaming corporations, and maybe uniquely, individuals.
Like the Epstein list – not one you would want to be on.
Nature – Quantifying climate loss and damage consistent with a social cost of carbon:
Climate change is causing measurable harm globally. Political and legal efforts seek to link these damages with specific emissions, including in discussions of loss and damage (L&D); however, no quantitative definition of L&D exists, nor is there a framework to link past and future emissions from specific sources to monetized, location-specific damages. Here we develop such a framework, which is integrated with recent efforts to estimate the social cost of carbon7. Using empirical estimates of the non-linear relationship between temperature and aggregate economic output, we show that future damages from past emissions—one component of L&D—are at least an order of magnitude larger than historical damages from the same emissions. For instance, one tonne of CO2emitted in 1990 caused US$180 in discounted global damages by 2020 ($40–530) and will cause an additional $1,840 through 2100 ($500–5,700). Thus, settling debts for past damages will not settle debts for past emissions. In other illustrative estimates, a single long-haul flight per year over the past decade leads to about $25k ($6,000–77,000) in future damages by 2100, and US emissions since 1990 caused $500 billion ($180–1,300 billion) of damage in India and $330 billion ($110–820 billion) in Brazil. Carbon removal offers an alternative to transfer payments for settling L&D, but is increasingly ineffective in limiting damages as the delay between emission and recapture increases.
Continue reading “Study: Climate’s Economic Damages by 2100 “Eye Watering””
Continuing the fire discussion – it’s worth clarifying that climate is indeed, despite recently amplified disinformation, expanding the threat of wildfires.
Of particular concern is the expansion of wildfires from the more arid western areas we have grown accustomed to, eastward toward larger populations.
Over the next few weeks, there’s little relief in the form of rain on the horizon for Nebraska. Another big surge of wind is expected Thursday and will be preceded by record heat on Wednesday. A recently updated seasonal outlook from the Climate Prediction Center expects more drought through June.
he same goes for places such as New Mexico, Wyoming, Florida, Texas, South Dakota and parts of Arizona, said Casperson. It reached 84 degrees in Flagstaff, Arizona, on Thursday — a temperature that had never previously been reached in the city before May 2, considering records dating to 1898.
But the state Casperson is watching the most closely?
“Colorado is where I’m looking,” he said.
The state has a history of powerful, explosive blazes that can rip through dry grasslands and forests and have only been getting worse — 17 of the 20 largest wildfires occurred in the last 10 years. In 2020, three wildfires shattered records with how much land they burned, damaging large parts of state parks. A year later, the Marshall Fire destroyed more than 1,000 homes in the suburbs outside Boulder.
Continue reading “Climate Change will Move US Wildfire Threats Eastward”At Fossil Fuel’s big CERA Week shindig this week, not much clarity about where energy markets are going in response to the unthinkable closure of Strait of Hormuz.
Above, some concerns expressed by Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank.
Some other voices breaking from the pack, as well.
New York Times Climate Forward via email:
If this is such a big energy shock, why aren’t oil prices higher?
The chief executives of Chevron and Shell expressed a great deal of concern that the futures market for oil, which we have all been watching very closely, doesn’t fully capture the scale of the disruption to the physical trade of oil and the physical trade of products like jet fuel and diesel in particular.
We’re getting really mixed messages about the trajectory of the war moving forward. My sense is that traders are having a hard time making sense of that.
National Snow and Ice Data Center:
or the second consecutive year, winter sea ice in the Arctic reached a level that matches the lowest peak observed since satellite monitoring began in 1979. On March 15, Arctic sea ice extent reached 5.52 million square miles (14.29 million square kilometers), very close to the 2025 peak of 5.53 million square miles (14.31 million square kilometers). Scientists with NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado, Boulder, note that the two years are statistically tied.
Along with the overall extent, researchers are also observing changes in ice thickness. “Based on what we’re seeing with NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite, much of the ice in the Arctic is thinner this year, especially in the Barents Sea northeast of Greenland.,” said Nathan Kurtz, chief of the Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The Sea of Okhotsk that borders northern Japan and Russia also had relatively low ice this year — a region that naturally experiences significant year-to-year variability.”
Scientists with NASA and NSIDC found that this winter’s peak Arctic ice coverage continues the long-term trend observed over the past several decades. This year, peak ice cover was below the average levels between 1981 and 2010 by roughly half a million square miles (about 1.3 million square kilometers).
Sea ice extent is defined as the total area of the ocean with at least 15% ice concentration. The area of the Arctic Ocean covered in ice expands in the cold of winter. Although much of the sea ice melts in warmer months, some ice remains throughout the year. Recently, less new ice has been forming. As a result, less multi-year ice has accumulated.
“A low year or two don’t necessarily mean much by themselves,” said NSIDC ice scientist Walt Meier. But viewed within the long‑term downward trend since 1979, Meier added, they add to the overall picture of change in Arctic sea ice throughout the seasons.
Continue reading “Graph of the Week: Annual Arctic Sea Ice Maximum”