Month: March 2026

Study: Climate’s Economic Damages by 2100 “Eye Watering”

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.

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Climate Change will Move US Wildfire Threats Eastward

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.

Washington Post:

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.

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Could a War with No Plan Mean a Crash with No Bottom?

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.

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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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