Republican Jim Inhofe and Democrat Barbara Boxer released dueling videos to their respective audiences at the UN Climate Change Conference in Doha, Qatar, Thursday.
The chairman of the committee, California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, stressed the need to confront climate change, cheered President Obama for his role in carbon emissions reductions, and claimed that Hurricane Sandy foreshadowed the devastation of further climate change.
The Associated Press is reporting that last week Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack had some harsh words for rural America: It’s “becoming less and less relevant,” he says.
A month after an election that Democrats won even as rural parts of the country voted overwhelmingly Republican, the former Democratic governor of Iowa told farm belt leaders this past week that he’s frustrated with their internecine squabbles and says they need to be more strategic in picking their political fights.
“It’s time for us to have an adult conversation with folks in rural America,” Vilsack said in a speech at a forum sponsored by the Farm Journal. “It’s time for a different thought process here, in my view.”
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered a new region at the far reaches of our solar system that scientists feel is the final area the spacecraft has to cross before reaching
interstellar space.
Scientists refer to this new region as a magnetic highway for charged particles because our sun’s magnetic field lines are connected to interstellar magnetic field lines. This connection allows lower-energy charged particles that originate from inside our heliosphere — or the bubble of charged particles the sun blows around itself — to zoom out and allows higher-energy particles from outside to stream in. Before entering this region, the charged particles bounced around in all directions, as if trapped on local roads inside the heliosphere.
The Voyager team infers this region is still inside our solar bubble because the direction of the magnetic field lines has not changed. The direction of these magnetic field lines is predicted to change when Voyager breaks through to interstellar space. The new results were described at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco on Monday.
"Although Voyager 1 still is inside the sun’s environment, we now can taste what it’s like on the outside because the particles are zipping in and out on this magnetic highway," said Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "We believe this is the last leg of our journey to interstellar space. Our best guess is it’s likely just a few months to a couple years away. The new region isn’t what we expected, but we’ve come to expect the unexpected from Voyager."
Since December 2004, when Voyager 1 crossed a point in space called the termination shock, the spacecraft has been exploring the heliosphere’s outer layer, called the heliosheath. In this region, the stream of charged particles from the sun, known as the solar wind, abruptly slowed down from supersonic speeds and became turbulent. Voyager 1’s environment was consistent for about five and a half years. The spacecraft then detected that the outward speed of the solar wind slowed to zero.
The intensity of the magnetic field also began to increase at that time.
Voyager data from two onboard instruments that measure charged particles showed the spacecraft first entered this magnetic highway region on July 28, 2012. The region ebbed away and flowed toward Voyager 1 several times. The spacecraft entered the region again Aug. 25 and the environment has been stable since.
"If we were judging by the charged particle data alone, I would have thought we were outside the heliosphere," said Stamatios Krimigis, principal investigator of the low-energy charged particle instrument, based at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md. "But we need to look at what all the instruments are telling us and only time will tell whether our interpretations about this frontier are correct."
Spacecraft data revealed the magnetic field became stronger each time Voyager entered the highway region; however, the direction of the magnetic field lines did not change.
"We are in a magnetic region unlike any we’ve been in before — about 10 times more intense than before the termination shock — but the magnetic field data show no indication we’re in interstellar space," said Leonard Burlaga, a Voyager magnetometer team member based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "The magnetic field data turned out to be the key to pinpointing when we crossed the termination shock. And we expect these data will tell us when we first reach interstellar space."
Voyager 1 and 2 were launched 16 days apart in 1977. At least one of the spacecraft has visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object, about 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) away from the sun. The signal from Voyager 1 takes approximately 17 hours to travel to Earth. Voyager 2, the longest continuously operated spacecraft, is about 9 billion miles (15 billion kilometers) away from our sun. While Voyager 2 has seen changes similar to those seen by Voyager 1, the changes are much more gradual. Scientists do not think Voyager 2 has reached the magnetic highway.
The Voyager spacecraft were built and continue to be operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The Voyager missions are a part of NASA’s Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/voyager and http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov.
Illustration – The Sun’s Southern Wind Flows Northward: This artist’s concept shows how NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is bathed in solar wind from the southern hemisphere flowing northward. This phenomenon creates a layer just inside the outer boundary of the heliosphere, the giant bubble of solar ions surrounding the sun. If the outside pressure were symmetrical, the streams from the sun’s northern hemisphere above the plane of the planets would all turn northward and the streams from the southern hemisphere would all turn southward.
However, the interstellar magnetic field presses more strongly on the boundary in the southern hemisphere, forcing some of the solar wind from the south that otherwise would have gone southward to be deflected northward to where Voyager 1 is. On July 21, 2012, the magnetometer instrument indicated that Voyager 1 had entered a region where the wind is from the southern hemisphere. Scientists interpret this to mean that the spacecraft is in the final region before reaching interstellar space because the southern wind streams have to flow out and around all of the northern wind to reach Voyager 1’s location.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Israel’s IDF has responded to the New York Times’ accusation that they targeted journalists by pointing out "Hamas and Islamic Jihad use journalists for terrorism."
At the heart of the matter is the NYT’s claim that certain Palestinians targeted by the IDF during Operation Pillar of Defense were actually journalists. However, it turns out the NYT received its information on the "journalists" from groups with ties to Hamas. The paper relied on The Committee to Protect Journalists for its info, while The Committee to Protect Journalists appears to have relied in part on Hamas.
The IDF has named the three "journalists"—Mohamed Abu Aisha, Hussam Salama, and Mahmoud al-Kumi—and shown that all three had ties to Islamic Jihad or were operatives for Hamas.
This past month, I announced Oklahoma would not implement two key components of President Obama’s health care law: the creation of a health insurance exchange and the expansion of Medicaid. I’m writing this month to let you know why that decision is in the best interests of Oklahoma taxpayers and families.
For several months, my staff and I have worked with other lawmakers, Oklahoma stakeholders and health care experts across the country to determine the best course of action for Oklahoma in regards to both a possible health insurance exchange and the potential expansion of Medicaid.
Our priority has been to ascertain what can be done to increase quality and access to health care, contain costs, and do so without placing an undue burden on taxpayers or the state. As I have stated many times before, it is my firm belief that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) fails to further these goals, and will in fact decrease the quality of health care across the United States while contributing to the nation’s growing deficit crisis.
Despite my ongoing opposition to the federal health care law, however, the state of Oklahoma found itself legally obligated to either build an exchange that is PPACA compliant and approved by the Obama Administration, or to default to an exchange run by the federal government. This choice was forced on the people of Oklahoma by the Obama Administration in spite of the fact that voters have overwhelmingly expressed their opposition to the federal health care law time and time again.
After careful consideration, I decided last month that Oklahoma would not pursue the creation of its own health insurance exchange. As I said at the time, any exchange that is PPACA compliant will necessarily be ‘state-run’ in name only and would require Oklahoma resources, staff and tax dollars to implement. It does not benefit Oklahoma taxpayers to actively support and fund a new government program that would ultimately be under the control of the federal government and that is opposed by a clear majority of Oklahomans. Furthermore, the creation of such an exchange would further the implementation of a law that threatens to erode both the quality of American health care and the fiscal stability of the nation.
With regards to Medicaid, I also announced that Oklahoma would not be participating in the Obama Administration’s proposed expansion. Such an expansion would have been unaffordable, costing the state of Oklahoma $475 million between now and 2020, with escalating annual expenses in subsequent years. It would also have furthered Oklahoma’s reliance on federal money that may or may not have been available in the future given the dire fiscal problems facing the federal government. On a state level, massive new costs associated with Medicaid expansion would also have required cuts to important government priorities such as education and public safety. Finally, the proposed Medicaid expansion offers no meaningful reform to a massive entitlement program already contributing to the out-of-control spending of the federal government.
Moving forward, it is important for the state of Oklahoma to pursue two actions simultaneously. The first will be to continue support for Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt’s ongoing legal challenge of PPACA. General Pruitt’s lawsuit raises different Constitutional questions than previous legal challenges, and both he and I remain optimistic that Oklahoma’s challenge can succeed.
Our second and equally important task will be to pursue state-based solutions that improve health outcomes and contain costs for Oklahoma families. Serious reform, for instance, should be pursued in the area of Medicaid and public health, where effective chronic disease prevention and management programs could address the trend of skyrocketing medical bills linked to avoidable hospital and emergency room visits. I look forward to working with legislative leaders and lawmakers in both parties to pursue Oklahoma health care solutions for Oklahoma families.