Washington Times via Drudge Report

The Obama administration is poised to ban offshore oil drilling on the outer continental shelf until 2012 or beyond. Meanwhile, Russia is making a bold strategic leap to begin drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. While the United States attempts to shift gears to alternative fuels to battle the purported evils of carbon emissions, Russia will erect oil derricks off the Cuban coast.

Offshore oil production makes economic sense. It creates jobs and helps fulfill America's vast energy needs. It contributes to the gross domestic product and does not increase the trade deficit. Higher oil supply helps keep a lid on rising prices, and greater American production gives the United States more influence over the global market.

Drilling is also wildly popular with the public. A Pew Research Center poll from February showed 63 percent support for offshore drilling for oil and natural gas. Americans understand the fundamental points: The oil is there, and we need it. If we don't drill it out, we have to buy it from other countries. Last year, the U.S. government even helped Brazil underwrite offshore drilling in the Tupi oil field near Rio de Janeiro. The current price of oil makes drilling economically feasible, so why not let the private sector go ahead and get our oil?

The Obama administration, however, views energy policy through green eyeshades. Every aspect of its approach to energy is subordinated to radical environmental concerns. This unprecedented lack of balance is placing offshore oil resources off-limits. The O Force would prefer the country shift its energy production to alternative sources, such as nuclear, solar and wind power. In theory, there's nothing wrong with that, in the long run, assuming technology can catch up to demand. But we have not yet reached the green utopia, we won't get there anytime soon, and America needs more oil now.

Russia more sensibly views energy primarily as a strategic resource. Energy is critical to Russia's economy, as fuel and as a source of profit through export. Russia also has used energy as a coercive diplomatic tool, shutting off natural gas piped to Eastern Europe in the middle of winter to make a point about how dependent the countries are that do business with the Russians.

Now Russia is using oil exploration to establish a new presence in the Western Hemisphere. It recently concluded four contracts securing oil-exploration rights in Cuba's economic zone in the Gulf of Mexico. A Russian-Cuban joint partnership will exploit oil found in the deep waters of the Gulf.

Cuba has rights to the area in which drilling will be conducted under an agreement the Carter administration recognized. From Russia's perspective, this is another way to gain leverage inside what traditionally has been America's sphere of influence. It may not be as dramatic as the Soviet Union attempting to use Cuba as a missile platform, but in the energy wars, the message is the same. Russia is projecting power into the Western Hemisphere while the United States retreats. The world will not tolerate a superpower that acts like a sidekick much longer.

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Deutsche Welle

In ancient history, men would sometimes look up into the extreme northern or southern skies and see flickering green or blue lights shimmering across heavens. These auroras were often attributed to the gods, for what else could explain such displays?

Today we have a more scientific explanation for the polar lights, known as aurora borealis in the Northern Hemisphere and aurora australis in the Southern: the effect is caused by charged particles from the sun colliding with the Earth's magnetic field.

This phenomenon is just one side effect of what is called space weather. The fact is that the Earth is constantly pelted with radiation from the sun, which can play havoc with a society that is increasingly dependent on its high-tech toys.

But for hikers, drivers, pilots and ship's captains, perhaps the biggest concern is that interference from the solar radiation could mislead or disable their global positioning system (GPS) signal.

Cyclic mechanisms

The aurora borealis is easier to behold in certain years based on a cycle of solar activity, which scientists like Dr. Dirk Soltau at the Kiepenheuer Institute for Solar Physics in Freiburg, Germany, are still attempting to understand fully even after 400 years of study.

“In 1610, Galileo Galilei first noticed ugly spots on the face of the sun,” Soltau told Deutsche Welle. “And he was bothered by this because for him the sun was pure fire and he was surprised to see these, what we call sun spots today.”

Eventually, a pattern became clear in the activity of these spots on the face of the sun. Over an 11-year cycle, sunspots become more prevalent and then less and less so. The last period of heightened solar activity was between 2000 and 2002. Within the past few months, sunspots have once again been seen on the face of the sun, Soltau said, which indicate the beginning of the 24th recorded solar cycle, meaning solar activity will increase over the next five years.

That activity means that by 2015, more charged particles from the sun will be interacting with the ionosphere in the Earth's upper atmosphere. This can lead to the ionosphere thickening and interfering with orbiting satellites, Soltau said.

Space weather

The seriousness of the effects of space weather led NASA to launch the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) into orbit in February to conduct a detailed study of the sun and its dynamic behavior.

"Space weather can disable satellites, cause power grid failures and disrupt global positioning, television and telecommunication signals," a NASA statement on SDO said.

GPS navigation systems have gained increased popularity over the past few years to the extent that the devices are ubiquitous in vehicles on the autobahn across Germany. But the receivers are not without their own pitfalls, according to Dr. Mohinder Grewal of the California State University at Fullerton.

Flawed systems

As a complex operation, there are multiple errors that navigation systems such as the US-based GPS, the Russian Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS) or Europe's planned Galileo system could suffer from, Grewal said.

A location error can occur when the satellite's position in the sky is not accurately locked down by the receiver. The system also relies on extremely precise timing, and so clock errors can create error distances of a few meters. Add to these the distortion caused by humidity in the troposphere and multi-path errors caused by reflective surfaces and the cumulative signal error can be up to 50 meters

When solar radiation causes a flux of ionized particles in the ionosphere, the radio signals used to send data to the receivers on the Earth can be delayed causing more errors on the ground.

Satellite hardware as well as the data is at risk from solar radiation warned Alex Freundlich, professor of physics at the University of Houston.

"Unusually high fluxes of ionizing particles that are associated with high sun activities could be detrimental to the satellite power system and may result in the performance degradation of their solar cells," Freundlich said.

In fact, any orbiting equipment that is unshielded could be degraded by increased solar activity, he added.

Problem solving

But various global agencies have been working hard to counteract the effects of solar radiation and other errors in satellite navigation systems. The European Space Agency (ESA) recently launched the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS), which improves the accuracy of satellite navigation signals over Europe.

Using EGNOS, signal accuracy can be improved down to 1.5 meters, according to ESA.

EGNOS consists of three geostationary satellites over the eastern Atlantic Ocean and Europe. The system augments signals from the GPS system and GLONASS, automatically correcting for the multiple potential errors in the signal.

The great unknown

But as scientists toil to tame nature and make the universe a more predictable place, the solar system does not always comply.

For decades the regular solar cycle simply ceased, according to Soltau at the Kiepenheuer Institute.

"Between about 1650 and 1715, apparently there was very low solar activity, so this cyclic mechanism stopped, and they called this the Maunder Minimum," Soltau said.

Over the past two years the levels of solar activity were so low that there was some conjecture that a new Maunder Minimum period had begun. Only recently, Soltau said, had sunspots been seen leading the scientific community to believe that the solar activity cycle continues.

Author: Stuart Tiffen
Editor: Mark Mattox

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