By Daniel V. Kish

On the last day of March, President Obama traveled to Andrews Air Force Base to announce his new program for exploring for energy on America’s Outer Continental Shelf (OCS).

Then he returned to the White House to announce his support for a holiday for the late Cesar Chavez, the famous head of the United Farm Workers Union.

His “energy plan” will not increase U.S. energy supplies...it will reduce them.  His actions on energy will not help the hard working supporters of Cesar Chavez, but they will do wonders for Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan dictator who will be able to sell the U.S. more of his oil because of the president’s dangerous neglect and misunderstanding of U.S. energy production’s importance to our economic and national security.

Obama did not open up new areas for drilling in the OCS - he closed them.  He didn’t make new supplies of energy available; he embargoed them from use by American citizens.  He didn’t take steps to lessen dependence on foreign oil; he increased our dependence.

In short, his actions did not match his words, and Americans will pay the price for years to come.

The spin from his image-makers was clear - a major shift in policy was underway, which would open new areas on the Atlantic Coast to drilling.  He would even allow drilling off of Virginia.  But these areas were already open for drilling, following a national outcry in the summer of 2008 when the price of oil reached $150 per barrel.

President Bush and the Democratic Congress acted then to drop the decades-long embargo on U.S. oil and gas supplies, leaving only a small area in the eastern Gulf of Mexico off limits for energy production. The only holdup since then to leasing U.S. waters has been the foot-dragging of his choice for Secretary of Interior, Ken Salazar.

So what does the President’s plan really do?  First of all, it kicks the can down the road on the issue of leasing off the coast of Virginia, from 2011 to 2012.  Leasing off Virginia’s coast has received bipartisan support from state and federal politicians, and was a key component of Gov. Bob McDonnell’s successful election campaign.  The sale was scheduled for 2011; now it’s 2012.

As for the “new areas” off the Atlantic Coast from Maryland to Georgia, the new plan doesn’t call for OCS leasing in those areas, but instead, Salazar will study those areas for possible inclusion in a new plan that he’ll announce in 2011 or thereabouts and which may or may not go into effect between 2012 and 2017.  This area was already proposed for leasing in a plan he threw overboard that was supposed to start this year. 

The entire west coast is now off limits, thanks to Obama’s plan to open new areas.  That means California’s 10 billion barrels of oil and all the jobs, money and energy they would produce for that bankrupt state are now under embargo.

But the biggest threat to U.S. energy security is what the president did in Alaska, and by extension, to America.  He cancelled five existing lease sales that were to be held in 2011 and 2012.

Two of the sales are in the Chukchi Sea, adjacent to where Russia is exploring for and producing oil and gas.  According to Salazar’s own Department of Interior, the Chukchi Sea area could hold as much as 77 billion barrels of oil.  This is over three times as much oil as the U.S. has in proven reserves, and by itself, is larger than Russia’s total proven oil reserves.

Obama’s new plan for drilling offshore in America is a lot like his old plan:  Don’t do it.  The fact that his image team went overboard to sell it as offshore drilling means he has seen the polls that show two-thirds of Americans support more offshore drilling. Too bad his Secretary of the Interior doesn’t. Read more at the Washington Examiner here.

Daniel V. Kish is senior vice president for policy for the Institute for Energy Research.

See Denver Post’s next day reanalysis here.

Interview by Patrick Lynch, NASA Langley Research Center

Dave Young is the Project Scientist for NASA;s CLimate Absolute Radiance and REfractivity Observatory (CLARREO). CLARREO is a climate-focused mission set to launch in the latter part of this decade. The goal of the mission is to measure tiny, incremental changes in the amount of energy entering and leaving Earth’s atmosphere—with such accuracy that even minor global warming trends over the course of a decade will be detected with confidence. These climate change measurements will carry the “fingerprints” of what caused them, including those caused by human activity.

You’re project scientist for NASA’s CLARREO mission. Tell us about the project.

One of the things that prevents us from making definitive statements about climate change is the accuracy of the current observing system we have. A major goal of the CLARREO mission is to provide extremely accurate climate measurements—at the accuracy level of tenths of a percent per decade. By knowing these trends very precisely, we can improve the accuracy of climate change forecasts, which will help society make the tough decisions we’re facing.

So what sort of data will it collect, and how?

CLARREO won’t measure individual aspects of our climate, such as changes in carbon dioxide levels or ice sheet changes. Instead, it will look at the climate system as a whole, by tracking the amount of energy entering and leaving the Earth’s atmosphere. We’ll do this by making measurements of the entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation in the atmosphere, including infrared waves (heat) and reflected sunlight. These are the two components of what we call the Earth’s “energy budget,” which can tell us over time whether or not the planet is getting warmer or cooler.

We know the things that can cause our climate to change. They include changes in the intensity of the sun, and increases in heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. What we want to learn is how the Earth responds to these driving forces, and any other secondary feedback effects that might occur. For example, say the Earth responds to increases in carbon dioxide levels by warming up; a warmer planet causes more water to evaporate and increases the amount of certain types of clouds. Clouds could either accelerate or slow down subsequent global warming. By taking very accurate energy measurements from space over a long period of time, we’ll be able to measure these responses and feedbacks on decade-long timescales.

CLARREO claims it will produce an “irrefutable climate record.” Does that mean it will put an end to climate change controversy?

Producing a trusted and tested climate record is one of our goals. First, we will strive for 100 percent transparency. Part of this [recent] email scandal is that people think data and results have been hidden. Second, we will characterize our instruments as thoroughly as anybody has ever done. On board the spacecraft there will be a verification system that’s constantly monitoring not only the measurements we make, but also how accurately we’re making those measurements. Then I think you’ll have as close to an irrefutable measurement as possible.

People want to talk in certainty. They want to say climate change is a certainty. Or, climate change is nonsense. That doesn’t work. Predicting future climate change is about offering a range of potential scenarios based on a range of present-day factors, and then determining the most likely scenario. We’re designing the mission such that if people want to delve into it and question our results, the answers will be there for all to see.

What will we learn about our influence on the Earth’s climate that we didn’t know before?

That’s one of the things we’re trying to answer specifically by working with the climate modelers. The goal is to have a set of highly accurate measurements that can be used to track today’s global warming trends and to improve climate models’ predictions for the future. We’ve pretty much shown that you can separate man-made climate change from natural climate variations using the data we expect to collect. You’ll see the impact of changes in carbon dioxide, methane and other gases reflected in the changes in the temperatures we measure. By comparing these numbers to the climate models, we’ll really understand how that climate change developed.

One of the most important climate summits in history happened just a few months ago in Copenhagen. How would CLARREO’s data help world leaders make better policy decisions?

If CLARREO were in orbit now, I think we’d have a much better assessment of climate change, particularly during the satellite era, and a more precise knowledge of climate trends over the last several decades. That would help the debate. Would it have made Copenhagen a joyous celebration of unanimity among the nations? No, because there are other things - political and economic - that are contributing factors to the debate. Basically, what CLARREO will do is provide more confidence in the scientific information we have, from the CLARREO record itself and also from comparisons with other measurements.

See more here.

CBS News

The first of several British investigations into the e-mails leaked from one of the world’s leading climate research centers has largely vindicated the scientists involved. The House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee said Wednesday that they’d seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit or its director, Phil Jones, had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming two of the most serious criticisms levied against the climatologist and his colleagues.

In their report, the committee said that, as far as it was able to ascertain, “the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact,” adding that nothing in the more than 1,000 stolen e-mails, or the controversy kicked up by their publication, challenged scientific consensus that “global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity.”

The 14-member committee’s investigation is one of three launched after the dissemination, in November, of e-mails and data stolen from the research unit. The e-mails appeared to show scientists berating skeptics in sometimes intensely personal attacks, discussing ways to shield their data from public records laws, and discussing ways to keep skeptics’ research out of peer-reviewed journals. One that attracted particular media attention was Jones’ reference to a “trick” that could be used to “hide the decline” of temperatures.

The e-mails’ publication ahead of the Copenhagen climate change summit sparked an online furor, with skeptics of man-made climate change calling the e-mails’ publication “Climategate” and claiming them as proof that the science behind global warming had been exaggerated or even made up altogether. The lawmakers said they decided to investigate due to “the serious implications for U.K. science.”

Phil Willis, the committee’s chairman, said of the e-mails that “there’s no denying that some of them were pretty appalling.” But the committee found no evidence of anything beyond “a blunt refusal to share data,” adding that the idea that Jones was part of a conspiracy to hide evidence that weakened the case for global warming was clearly wrong. In a briefing to journalists ahead of the report’s release, Willis said the controversy would ultimately help buttress the case for global warming by forcing the University East Anglia and other research institutions to stop hoarding their data. “The winner in the end will be climate science itself,” he said.

The winner on Wednesday was Jones, who stepped down temporarily as chief of the climate research unit about week after the e-mail scandal broke. The committee expressed sympathy with Jones, whom Willis said had been made a scapegoat for larger problems within the climate science community. “The focus on Professor Jones and the CRU has been largely misplaced,” the report said. But the lawmakers did criticize the way Jones and his colleagues handled freedom of information requests, saying scientists could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by aggressively publishing all their data instead of worrying about how to stonewall their critics.

Lawmakers stressed that their report which was written after only a single day of oral testimony did not cover all the issues and would not be as in-depth as the two other inquiries into the e-mail scandal that are still spending. Willis said the lawmakers had been in a rush to publish something before Britain’s next national election, which is widely expected in just over a month’s time. “Clearly we would have liked to spend more time of this,” he said, before adding jokingly: “We had to get something out before we were sent packing.”

One of the two pending inquiries is being headed by former civil servant Muir Russell, who is looking into whether scientists, including Jones, fudged data or manipulated the peer review process. It also is examining the extent to which university followed applicable freedom of information laws. See story here.