Saturday, April 29, 2017, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at El Presidio Park, 175 W. Alameda St. Tucson, Arizona.
“We need to stand together to protect our climate, our health, and our communities. Part of that is resisting the current political agenda of denial and obstruction — but it’s also crucial that we build a vision of the world we want, and rise together to make it possible. To change everything, we need everyone. On April 29, let’s march for jobs, justice, and the climate: peoplesclimate.org#ClimateMarch #TucsonClimateMarch
The route, speakers, venues, and logistics of the Tucson People’s Climate March is currently being organized by several notable non-profit groups — including the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club Rincon Group, andSky Island Alliance. If you or your organization is interested in organizing with us, please email climatemarch2017@skyislandalliance.org. We need your help!
We are looking for interested and experienced people to help lead and/or volunteer for the following committees:
– Logistics
– Safety & Accessibility
– Outreach & Media
– Fundraising & Finances
– Speakers & Entertainment
We will meet-up at 10am in El Presidio Park with guest speakers to launch on a march through downtown departing at 11am. We’ll loop back to the park for more speakers, music, a volunteer fair with local organizations, and other activities until 2pm (or later). More details to come soon!”
(from FB page: https://www.facebook.com/events/384421951933357/)
Info on the National DC march: https://peoplesclimate.org/
70 gigatons per year? Try to impress someone else.
Pop quiz: 1) How many gigatons is the entire Antarctic ice mass? 2) How many gigatons per year does Antarctic gain each year from precipitation?
There will be many groups with tables and information at the march. I’m looking forward to being with many hundreds of people who are working towards making the planet healthier for all of us. Thank you, Mr. Cizek, for your cogent explanation of why coal is not making a come back in the United States.
thanks for commenting Jenise — see you at the People’s Climate March on Saturday. There should be a lot of enthusiasm once again.
too bad the coal miners of western pennsylvania, eastern ohio, west virgina and kentucky. will NOW be to busy to join in the march. sign I saw outside polling place in western pennsylvania. “trump digs coal clinton digs transgender bathrooms.” the tofu and snowflake liberal elitists wanted the coal miners to sacrifice their livelihoods for the common good as the liberal elitists fly over them in fly over space on their polluting jets. how dare the coal miners and their families vote trump! micheal moore in his film trump land tried to warn the clinton campaign I tried to warn them ;but they knew it all and you couldn’t tell them anything!
Perhaps so, but the coal jobs aren’t coming back. China is rapidly moving to solar, a move caused by all the smog and pea soup in their cities, but certainly exacerbated by major efficiency advances in wind, solar, and other renewables (whether due to learning-by-doing, by R&D spending, etc. is relevant for policy, but not so much for outcomes).
And, ironically for environmentalists (a category in which I include myself), a lot of the reason why coal prices have been tumbling is because natural gas prices have fallen, at least in part due to fracking and other ‘advanced extraction techniques’. Natural gas has emerged to supplant previous coal-burning plants throughout much of the country.
However, a lot of jobs being created today are in renewables – something like 1-2% of all new jobs nationally are just in solar. And Arizona is the second best place in the world for solar irradiation behind the Middle East (which itself is beginning to tap into solar power as well).
The question for our legislature and Corporation Commission is whether we want to continue to protect the coal industry and the big utility companies, or whether we want to take advantage of the renewable energy boom going forward.
Not that simple. Take the Western Interconnect for example. The Western Interconnect is the electrical system that stretches from Mexico to Canada, New Mexico to California to Wyoming to Washington state.
This system is a massive single marketplace for electrical power.
When does demand of the Western Interconnect customers peak? In the second week in August at 7 pm at night.
How much Arizona solar power is available to meet that peak demand?
Absolutely zero. nada. nothing. That peak demand has to be met with nuclear, coals, natural gas and oil fired units.
The marching morons have absolutely no clue as to the economics of energy.
The value of solar power has two components, one is for its energy the other is the power that it can deliver at the time of peak demand. Solar power has little to no power value, all of its value is energy.
At current values of coal, natural gas and oil, solar energy is worth, at most, $20 per megawatt-hour.
Forcing Arizona companies to pay $130 to purchase something worth $20 is economic insanity.
But, that is what the morons are marching for.
While they live in their parents basements wondering why there aren’t any jobs.
Did you include the emissions externality? Or are you going to cite another discredited and already rebutted paper or cherry-picked point of data to argue against that? Care to invoke a different scientist engaged in academic nepotism this time, or are you sticking with Morner again?
Even discounting the oil emissions, how about the loss in property values associated with being near a power plant, the soot, smog, ozone, NOx, SOx, and particulate matter emissions generated? And let’s not forget the health costs either, which are in the 11 to 12 figure range per year.
Did you include any amount of other renewables? Wind energy starts ramping up right as solar starts tapering off. How about energy storage technology being developed to transfer electricity intertemporally? Even primitive pumped-hydro storage can create some amount of smoothing of demand, and using cheap solar energy during the daytime to freeze water in order melt it to lessen the load on A/C units during the 6:30-7:30 time slot would work. And the utilities do have contracts with industry to curtail production and shut down temporarily when demand is at super-peak levels, so let’s not treat this like some insurmountable problem to overcome.
Why not mention in your analysis the billions in subsidies we currently give to oil and gas already? Or the billions more in implicit subsidies oil receives because we spend so much on the military in order to install strongmen throughout the Middle East to make the world safe for oil industry interests? How about the water being used to run these fossil fuel plants? And I personally don’t have a problem with maintaining existing nuclear power in the intermediate run in order to meet base load capacity, but let’s not pretend that nuclear power (at least the ones currently in operation) is something that can be ramped up with any semblance of efficiency to meet short-term changes in demand.
When the price being paid doesn’t include all of the costs actually associated with the good’s production and consumption, any market signal is effectively meaningless. I will grant that there are concerns about the use of rare-earth metals and certain toxins in first-generation solar panels, but as I understand, they are getting far cheaper and more efficient.
The solution to your points, of course, is energy storage and shifting around demand, as mentioned before. Also, shifting away from relatively inefficient renewable portfolio standards which implicitly subsidizes production of renewables for its own sake, toward an emissions pricing system. Hell, even working toward time-of-use pricing, as long as it is done in a sufficiently transparent manner so customers are aware of how to shift their electricity use around, could curtail the worst effects of the duck-curve. And of course, energy efficiency – weatherizing buildings and installing energy-efficient lighting – would address both the problem of wild changes in net demand while simultaneously reducing required peak generation capacity.
But that’s just one moron’s view.
No, the solution is not energy storage. Energy storage units are economic entities in their own right and can be evaluated based on their capital costs and system economics. There is no divine right that pairs them up with solar.
Storage units are very expensive sources of capacity, very expensive.
And, cost is only half the problem. Solar power is very low quality power both in its reliability and its power characteristics.
So much so that the industrial customers who have to have the highest quality and reliable power no longer consider Europe.
I don’t know who Morner is. Did I quote him at some time?
Arizona has had time of use pricing for decades. We moved probably 400 megawatts plus offpeak.
That’s been done.
We are now worshiping the sun, carbon, the wind, the seas – you name it. Exactly parallels ancient greek mythology. And, we have the priests in the journals to commune with the heavens and give us a religion that assures us a better life.
I prefer montheism and Socrates’ search for the truth. I am also aware of his tragic end.
by the way, how much of the 2.8 inches in ocean rise is the modeled floor of the ocean dropping?
The sea level rise is an average globally. There are a few areas of coastline, such as southwest Alaska, where the relative sea level is falling because volcanic activity and tectonic effect have pushed the land up higher than the average rise of the ocean.
Of course, there are also places where the relative sea level has risen drastically more, because absolute land level is falling, along with the sea level rise.
On the topic of Arizona’s having pushed demand to off-peak times, it’s worth noting that TEP’s summertime peak hours are 3 – 7 PM for purposes of residential time-of-use pricing. Given that net load is still relatively lower than during the 7 PM – 9 PM hours because of renewable capacity constraints, there does seem to be some disconnect between the incentives currently being offered and where the new peak of net load seems to be. This suggests at least some room for improvement in this area as well; I would hardly consider it ‘tapped out’ given that most residential and many commercial (but probably relatively few industrial) consumers still use basic usage pricing.
But, it is not a sea level rise is it? Most of the 2.7 inches is a modeled sea floor drop, correct?
Same way that the ice loss estimates are not actual ice loss estimates but modeled ice loss based on gravitational models, extremely obscure gravitational models.
Actual measurement by a hundred forty million laser measurements has ice at an all-time record.
Indeed – Antarctica has had record levels of ice. Just, record low levels of ice. Antarctica is losing land ice at unprecedented rates of some 70 gigatons per year. While it is gaining a little bit of sea ice, this is less important for ocean levels for the same reasons that when an ice cube melts in a glass of water, it doesn’t adjust the level of water – buoyancy. The eastern Antarctic ice sheet has been expanding a bit, but this small increase is more than offset by declines in Greenland and in the somewhat less stable West Antarctic sheet.
And while the reasons behind the sea ice rise are not fully understood, the current best explanation deals with both the Montreal Protocol and its effect on reducing CFC’s and the slow rejuvenation of stratospheric ozone levels, along with a freshening of the water, which both weakens the thermohalocline, as well as raises the freezing point of water as per the laws of chemistry.
Now, the arctic ice sheet is entirely sea ice, but is relevant for another reason. Ice has a much higher albedo than does water, and so has a reflective effect on solar radiation during the summer months. The continued retreat of the summer minimum levels of arctic sea ice represents one of the positive feedback mechanisms by which the forcing function operates.
Well we are right at the crux of the matter. You are saying that Antarctic is at record low levels of ice, I am saying it is at record low levels.
This following study is not the only laser measurement of Antarctic.
The Antarctic is gaining 112 gigatons per year of ice. By comparison, the Arctic and Greenland are losing less than 40 gigatons per year each. Voila, world ice is at an all-time record. The sea level data is falsified through modeling bias.
NASA Study: Mass Gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet Greater than Losses
Antarctic Peninsula
A new NASA study says that Antarctica is overall accumulating ice. Still, areas of the continent, like the Antarctic Peninsula photographed above, have increased their mass loss in the last decades.
Credits: NASA’s Operation IceBridge
Map showing the rates of mass changes from ICESat 2003-2008 over Antarctica.
Map showing the rates of mass changes from ICESat 2003-2008 over Antarctica. Sums are for all of Antarctica: East Antarctica (EA, 2-17); interior West Antarctica (WA2, 1, 18, 19, and 23); coastal West Antarctica (WA1, 20-21); and the Antarctic Peninsula (24-27). A gigaton (Gt) corresponds to a billion metric tons, or 1.1 billion U.S. tons.
Credits: Jay Zwally/ Journal of Glaciology
A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.
The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.
According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.
“We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” said Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study, which was published on Oct. 30 in the Journal of Glaciology. “Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica – there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.” Zwally added that his team “measured small height changes over large areas, as well as the large changes observed over smaller areas.”
Scientists calculate how much the ice sheet is growing or shrinking from the changes in surface height that are measured by the satellite altimeters. In locations where the amount of new snowfall accumulating on an ice sheet is not equal to the ice flow downward and outward to the ocean, the surface height changes and the ice-sheet mass grows or shrinks.
From 2003-2008, that may have been true (though alternative measurements, see the GRACE study, suggest otherwise), whereas the last three years (2014, 2015, and 2016) are the three hottest years on record, and there is no reason to suspect that the warming trend hasn’t continued over the past 10 years, and has indeed accelerated since.
As the author of the study you cite quotes:
‘The findings do not mean that Antarctica is not in trouble, Zwally notes. “I know some of the climate deniers will jump on this, and say this means we don’t have to worry as much as some people have been making out” . ‘
Ok, you didn’t take the pop quiz, so I will give you the answers:
Total ice around the world, about 8 million cubic miles, or 33 million cubic kilometers or 33 million gigatons.
So your 70 gigatons per year is .0002% of the world’s ice. Not even in the same ballpark as statistically significant. But, it also points out how easy it is to express bias and paint a false narrative of what is actually happening.
It gets worse than that. The Antarctic has 2,300 gigatons of precipitation each year (14 million km^2 times 166mm per yr). Your 70 gigatons is 70/2324, only 3% of precipitation. So, bias only needs to fractionally express itself in order to falsify the entire record.
There is a massive incentive to cook the books. Billions are spent on sustaining the horror of “climate change.”
Ed, you are obviously a good guy, but you are part of an elaborate fraud, decades in the making.
The end is near, savor it while you can. This isn’t a gravitational equation you can fudge with impunity:
To help accurately measure changes in Antarctica, NASA is developing the successor to the ICESat mission, ICESat-2, which is scheduled to launch in 2018. “ICESat-2 will measure changes in the ice sheet within the thickness of a No. 2 pencil,” said Tom Neumann, a glaciologist at Goddard and deputy project scientist for ICESat-2. “It will contribute to solving the problem of Antarctica’s mass balance by providing a long-term record of elevation changes.”
last week we were brought back to earth by the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), as charted by our friend Paul Homewood on his blog Notalotofpeopleknowthat, with the news that ever since December temperatures in the Arctic have consistently been lower than minus 20 C. In April the extent of Arctic sea ice was back to where it was in April 13 years ago.
Furthermore, whereas in 2008 most of the ice was extremely thin, this year most has been at least two metres thick.
The Greenland ice cap last winter increased in volume faster than at any time for years.
As for those record temperatures brought in 2016 by an exceptionally strong El Niño, the satellites now show that in recent months global temperatures have plummeted by more that 0.6 degrees: just as happened 17 years ago after a similarly strong El Niño had also made 1998 the “hottest year on record”.
This means the global temperature trend has now shown no further warming for 19 years. But the BBC won’t be telling us any of this. And we are still stuck with that insanely damaging Climate Change Act, which in this election will scarcely get a mention.
March route: “We will go in a loop through downtown Tucson – west on Alameda, south on Granada, east on Congress, north on Stone and west on Alameda back to El Presidio Plaza – 0.7 miles. More speakers, music, booths, food trucks, and artwork when we get back to El Presidio, until 2 pm.”