Graph of the Week: Annual Arctic Sea Ice Maximum

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.

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Water Shortages, Cities Sinking, Common Thread – Oil, Gas

This problem has been percolating in my feed for months. Major city on the edge of water crisis. Oil and gas production a major contributor. Climate driven heat wave adding to the urgency.

Texas Tribune:

A yearslong drought and a recent boom of refineries settling along Corpus Christi Bay has nearly drained the city’s water supply. Two of the city’s three main reservoirs have shrunk below 10% capacity. Now the city is depending on a patchwork of temporary sources for water, which may run dry by July.

Residents have been asked by the city to conserve water, with nonessential, outdoor watering prohibited. The city plans to limit how many days splash pads are open over summer break. A local high school canceled its annual car wash fundraiser. 

The Texas Tribune spoke to nearly a dozen locals, and many said they have been, begrudgingly, limiting their shower times and laundry runs, and letting their lawns turn brown. Residents say the shortage is impacting their daily lives, even though they don’t feel like they are the problem.

Alejandro is asking the city to place stricter regulations on refineries that are consuming most of the city’s water.

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Pay Up Suckers. Fossil Fuel Addiction Bites with Hormuz Closure

Financial Times:

The Middle East crisis will fuel a surge in US inflation to 4.2 per cent this year, the highest in the G7, according to an OECD forecast that highlights the cost of the US-Israeli war with Iran.

The Paris-based organisation predicted that energy price rises would sharply increase inflation around the world, with “significant downside risks” to growth if disruptions to energy exports worsened. While the OECD expects US inflation to jump from 2.6 per cent in 2025, countries including China, South Korea and India also face a sharp increase in price growth because of the energy shock.

“The breadth and duration of the conflict are very uncertain, but a prolonged period of higher energy prices will add markedly to business costs and raise consumer price inflation, with adverse consequences for growth,” the organisation predicted in its interim economic outlook.

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Novel Material May Enable CO2 Capture

New highly porous materials called MOFS, (metal organic framework) are now in commercial use capturing CO2 from waste streams at cement processing plants and other locations.
Engineers are amazing. Fan the embers of hope when we can.

UC Berkeley:

Now, chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered that a porous material can act like a sponge to capture CO2 at temperatures close to those of many industrial exhaust streams. The material — a type of metal-organic framework, or MOF — will be described in a paper to be published in the Nov. 15 print edition of the journal Science.

The dominant method for capturing carbon from power or industrial plant emissions employs liquid amines to absorb CO2, but the reaction only works efficiently at temperatures between 40 and 60 C (100–140 F). Cement manufacturing and steelmaking plants produce exhaust that exceeds 200 C (400 F), and some industrial exhaust approaches 500 C (930 F). New materials that are now being piloted, including a subclass of MOFs with added amines, break down at temperatures above 150 C (300 F) or work far less efficiently.

“A costly infrastructure is necessary to take these hot gas streams and cool them to the appropriate temperatures for existing carbon capture technologies to work,” said UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Kurtis Carsch, one of two co-first authors of the paper. “Our discovery is poised to change how scientists think about carbon capture. We’ve found that a MOF can capture carbon dioxide at unprecedentedly high temperatures — temperatures that are relevant for many CO2 emitting processes. This was something that was previously not considered as possible for a porous material.”

“Our work moves away from the prevalent study of amine-based carbon capture systems and demonstrates a new mechanism for carbon capture in a MOF that enables high temperature operation,” said UC Berkeley graduate student and co-first author Rachel Rohde.

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Iran Makes the Most of the Moment with Epic Trolling

NBC:

Each day since the start of the war in Iran, U.S. military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official said.

The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up.” 

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Iran’s Info Game is an AI Army of its own

We are in a paradigm shattering moment, where the loss of legitimacy and moral authority by the US leadership is so complete, that they are allowing a despotic radically conservative Muslim regime, with the help of a famously creative film industry – portray itself as the plucky underdog, complete with a hip-hop soundtrack.
Clearly they’ve been taking lessons from Ukraine’s playbook, and added a few pages of their own.

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The Grift War: Conflict as a Con Game

Above, vivid illustration of rather obvious insider trading in advance of recent social post that moved the price of oil.

WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
― Smedley Butler, War Is a Racket

Paul Krugman via Email:

Over the weekend Donald Trump threatened dire vengeance on Iran unless its government opened the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, a deadline that would expire Monday evening in Washington. Specifically, he announced that the U.S. would begin bombing power plants — plants that supply electricity to Iran’s civilian population — unless the Strait was cleared.

But at 7:05 AM Monday Trump called the whole thing off — for five days, he said, but many people are assuming that the threatened action, which would have been a massive war crime, is now off the table.

The reason for the about-face, he claimed, was that the U.S. was engaged in productive negotiations with Iranian officials — although this seems to have come as news to the Iranians, who denied that any such negotiations are taking place. Sad to say, in this case, as I tried to explain yesterday, the fanatical, brutal Iranian regime is more credible than the president of the United States. Is he lying or living in a fantasy world? Neither possibility is comforting.

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At $4 Dollars/Gallon, Good Timing for a New EV?

New York Times via email:

Average U.S. gasoline prices hit $3.98 per gallon on Tuesday, according to AAA, on the cusp of a level that was last hit when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

The last month has seen the second-largest gas price spike in three decades, with average prices climbing more than 30 percent since the war in Iran effectively shuttered the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway that conveys up to a fifth of the world’s oil.

Though there’s no hard and fast rule that dictates exactly what choices consumers make at $4, $5, and $6 per gallon, higher gas prices are already stressing household budgets. At $4 per gallon, more than half of Americans said they’d change their driving behavior, according to a 2022 survey by AAA. More recent data has also shown that Americans are delaying some forms of spending.

HeatMap:

The most important EV of 2026 has almost arrived. Rivian just announced the full lineup and details on the R2, the two-row, five-seat SUV that will make the American EV startup’s vehicles affordable for many more drivers. As promised, Rivian will begin deliveries this spring — but only on the top-end model. If you want to buy an R2 for less than $50,000, you’re going to be left waiting until the end of next year.

The R2’s arrival is truly a make-or-break moment for Rivian. The brand wowed the world with its electric pickup prototype in 2018; the SUV version, R1S, sold prestige EVs to plenty of well-heeled buyers who weren’t looking for a truck. The company now sits where Tesla sat in the late 2010s, just before the Model 3 and Model Y arrived — having lived through years of economic uncertainty, now hoping its mass-market offerings can elevate it from niche brand to large-scale car company. R2’s success would accomplish that and pave the way for the even more affordable R3 that is supposed to get Rivian into the $30,000s.

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