The Sun Has First Spotless Month Since 1913
radioweather writes "August 2008 has made solar history. As of 00 UTC September 1st 2008 (5PM PST)
we just witnessed the
first spotless calendar month since June 1913.This was determined according
to sunspot
data from NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center, which goes back to 1749.
In the 95 years since 1913, we've had quite an active sun, but activity has been
declining in the last few years. The sun today is a nearly featureless sphere and has been spotless for 42
days total, but this is the first full calendar month since 1913 for a spotless
sun. And there are other indicators of the sun being in a funk. Australia's
space weather agency recently revised their solar cycle 24 forecast, pushing the
expected date for a ramping up of
cycle 24 sunspots into the future by six months."
As one of the links above indicate, there was a "sunspeck" reported August 21/22, though. Reader MikeyTheK adds a link to a story at Daily Tech on the spotless record.
The sun has discovered the best acne medication in the universe.
I am officially gone from
to 'prove' that global warming isn't manmade.
There we go, asking people to prove negatives again. Why don't you start by proving that it IS man-made?
Or conversely, prove that it ISN'T caused by the belly button lint of invisible space goats.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"Sun Has First Spotless Month Since 1913"
... see, its not a black hole making machine, it actually washes whiter than white.
... zip ... crush]
Ok, who switched on the LHC!
Ha!, that'll stop the critics who think the earth will vanish in a instant... see nothing to worry ab.o.u..t... [KABOOOMMMMMM
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
When a big solar storm turns off GPS for a few hours or days. I know some people that have become dependent on their nav-computers.
A weak solar cycle may postpone this problem.
I can't wait to come back later and find out how this is caused by George W. Bush, the US, or Bush's failure to sign on to the Kyoto treaty (even though Clinton was president at the time).
Do you have ESP?
OH MY
So... CO2 causes global warming, apparently on Mars and Jupiter too. Yet when sunspot activity decreases, this whole global warming trend slows down (to the tune of no increase of global temperature in over 8 years). And in the 1990s when sunspot activity was some of the highest ever recorded, global temperatures rose. I wonder if this is a coincidence.... or is it?
So really... are you all still addicted to that theory? That it's all about the CO2?
I know. How strange is it that they think that the largest source of heat in the entire solar system would have ANYTHING to do with one of the planets getting warmer...
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Funny ... I thought liberals were going to use it as proof that global warming was so out of control, it was affecting the sun. First it melts the polar icecaps, now the sunspots. ;)
Oh, crap, did I post this without checking the AC box?
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
"There we go, asking people to prove negatives again. Why don't you start by proving that it IS man-made?"
The argument being made is that it HAS been proven, as far as one can prove anything in such indeterministic systems.
Of course, we had proof for years that ulcers were caused by stress. Nope - bacteria.
Proof that the continents were immobile in their positions. Well, not so much proof as that it was just so totally OBVIOUS that continents couldn't move, and that "continental drift" was a crackpot theory. Until it wasn't.
AIDS was a breakdown of the immune system because of IV drug use, exposure to multiple venereal diseases, and the generally unhealth lifestyle of the gay community. Until they isolated a virus.
The reality is that scientific "proof" consists of general agreement among communities of people about the interpretation of observed phenomena, and that agreement can be driven by MANY factors, not just how well the data fits. One CANNOT get to the level of mathematical proof. So there will always be a role for skeptics, and those that just won't accept that, if you have a square peg and a round hole, you just pretend the peg's squareness doesn't exist, because it MUST fit into the round hole.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
nope :) I was just wondering what version of SunOS they had in 1913 :)
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
is that our temps are at all time highs. Yes, it is down SLIGHTLY i.e. a very small local minima, not even close to an absolute minima. So, if there is a correlation to temps the way that ppl like you push, what happens when sunspots increase?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yes, it is history since it happened in the past. That's how history works. It's probably not a piece of history that will hold great meaning for many people, but this is the "News for Nerds" website.
Nope, there's not a lot of other significance, unless you're interested in things like radio wave propagation or the effect of solar weather on space hardware.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
the Arctic ice refused to melt this summer. Does anyone remember the warning in June that the North Pole would be ice free?
Of course, their prediction was way off (as always). When someone realized how bad their prediction was, they fear monger some more with more dire warnings!
Remember that they have only been keeping sat. data for ice extent for a little over 3 decades, which of course is when the sun has been in a very active period.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
Ah good - that gives me more time to get my HF antenna up. No sunspots - no HF radio propagation....now I can put off climbing up on the roof.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
2008 is going to be the coolest year of the 21st century so far. A combination of an el nina and low sunspot activity. But it's still on target to be one of the warmest years on record. It ought to have been one of the coldest years on record.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
As to how the Earth is heating up due to there being too few sun spots or birds are falling out of the sky and little children are being eaten by monsters at the worlds edge.
I'm really interested in stories about science but every one like this seems to be taken as an excuse for the uninformed to come up with todays hair brained theory to scare the masses. I wonder if we can link this to terrorism in some way.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Of course atmospheric/climate scientists have considered the impact of the sun. Please, don't assume they're complete idiots.
The problem with global warming alarmism is not not the climate science is poor, but that it is used to rationalize unnecessarily intrusive interventions in people's lives that have little to do with preventing catastrophe, and very questionable impact on net emissions.
The obvious, least economically damaging, least intrusive way to handle the problem is to simply internalize the costs that CO2 emissions throw off, either by tradeable caps or a tax, and then apply the funds to mitigating the damage. Then, you don't have to do impossible calculations about which activities are "truly wasteful", and people can decide how they cut back. And even if they don't, such a solution is still robust, as such a decision would just generate more funds with which to handle the problem.
But the most vocal alarms don't want this. Instead, they propose a laundry list of intrusive interventions, and then want to pick and choose which technologies are the "right" ones. If they were honest about wanting to avert catastrophe, the debate today would be about the size of the tax or cap, not about whether we should ban this particular product on the grounds that it gets an emotional reaction out of some people. Alarmism has been more about whether you're "on the team" or not. If the most efficient solution for you is to get better insulation rather than a hybrid, well, the latter would signal that you're "one of them" and the former wouldn't, so ...
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
The argument being made is that it HAS been proven, as far as one can prove anything in such indeterministic systems.
If by GW you mean AGW then like hell it has. If you read ./ summaries, a few newspapers and A. Gore, then perhaps its a "fact". But read the source peer reviewed articles they claim to summarize. They use phrases like "it suggests", and "gives support to" rather than phrases like "statistically significant".
A good question to ask is how is the "mean" earth temperature measured, both current and Historic and whats the variance?
There are some facts out there that do matter (e.g. CO2 increases from industrialization). But thats not a proof of any claimed causal effects.
We simply have not been doing this sort of modeling long enough nor tested it enough to give credible confidence intervals yet. I'm not saying that mitigation programs now don't make sense. They do, but I can think of a lot of better reasons that AGW.
And in regard to general agreement in the scientific community WRT AGW? If you don't agree or are even just a little bit skeptical, you would have left that community a long time ago. Using a set of examples where there "was general agreement" that turned out to be wrong does not support the idea that "general agreement" on AGW is evidence of AGW.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
No shit. Nobody questions that. It is all about how much you are going to be taxed on the way there, and maybe beyond.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Read that as "The Sun has First Topless..", thought The Sun here in Toronto finally decided to spice up the Sunshine Girl.
As a conservative I believe more power to the individual and local governments rather than federal, lower taxes, lower spending.
Conservatives are cautious about global warming because Liberals are trying to introduce legislation based on it. We are handcuffing business, raising taxes, and affecting our day-to-day lives because of "global warming."
If this is what has to be done, so be it. We have a federal government for a reason.
On the other hand there is plenty of evidence that Global Warming does not exist and it is being pushed by Liberals with an agenda. This is unacceptable. We should not be destroying our economy because of "maybes."
...my boyfriend panics.
Someone killed summer.
Temperatures were much lower than average.
Skies were much more overcast.
I didn't even see a Michael Jordan Ballpark Frank commercial.
Global warming my ass.
I think that "on-target" bit is a bit of wishful thinking on the part of climatologists that la nina will break and temps will shoot up.
I the area I live, temperatures have been below average ALL year. This year we've had the latest snowfall I can remember in my lifetime, the latest date I can remember for the ice going off the lakes, unseasonably cold whether including the latest frost I can remember, a late start to spring planting.
Where I live it would take considerably above average temperatures for the entire rest of the year to get this year even close to being just average. Its nowhere near top ten where I live.
Cue the "it GLOBAL warming, your region might not be warmer," I certainly expect that response. However, that response reminds me of people who state that Mars' northern icecap is shrinking and the common debunking Global Warming alarmists give for that is that the warming on Mars is just "regional."
What I'm seeing where I live with regards to Global Warming isn't convincing me that its a crisis. In fact, if we have another 4-5 years of unseasonably cold springs, I'd really begin to think global cooling was on the way. Yes, spring and summer where I live have been shockingly cold this year.
Adrian Cronauer: Excuse me, sir. Seeing as how the V.P. is such a V.I.P., shouldn't we keep the P.C. on the Q.T.? 'Cause if it leaks to the V.C. he could end up M.I.A., and then we'd all be put out in K.P.
Has anyone asked Ken Shatten about this? For the latest weather on the sun -- http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/.
As for global warming, I was reminded by a friend that "the maximum temperature of Earth can be no higher than the maximum temperature of an equivalent black body, and the earth is approximately spherical and receives light from the sun on a cross-sectional area of a circle, but radiates thermal energy from the area of a sphere. The ratio of the spherical area to the circular area is four. Dividing the incoming energy flux by that gives the Earth an approximate maximum temperature of 285Kelvin. Again we have another inconsistency as this maximum temperature is below the widely reported global average temperature of 288Kelvin (17C). The maximum temperature found on the moon is approximately 390Kelvin." On Earth our maximum, like that of the moon, could be 117C. The official highest is around 57C, so we have another 60C possible increase!
Could this coincide with the upcoming Apocalypse on December 21st 2012?
Nah. Apocalypse? The classical Mayans would have had a party, which is what they did at the end of a lesser calendar cycle.
Then they'd either have started the Long Count cycle over or (much more likely in my opinion) modified it slightly to keep going. For instance, they could have added another cycle consisting of (for instance) 20 b'ak'tun.
The classical Mayans also occasionally dated events far in the future, which hardly suggests that they thought the world was ending. See the Wikipedia article on the Long Count, which, yeah, it's Wikipedia, but the article looks pretty decent. (There's also some support for the idea of higher-order cycles beyond the b'aktun like I suggest above.)
Actually, my tinfoil hat is much, much bigger than yours. The Powers That Be [PTB] (the queen, the rothchilds' the Colonel, etc.) control both the conservatives and liberals at the highest levels. They play us off each other and maintain their own power my ensuring the general public is clearly divided against each other, ignoring the rich and powerful who are the real problem.
Here's how it works:
The 'PTB' have recently given a lot of money and power to the libs to promote the global warming idea base on "science". This is a check on the conservatives, whom they slowly put in power over the last few decades in order to check the liberals they let in in the 60s and 70s, and so on. The dems will continue to gain power in congress and win the presidency this year, but the failure of Global Warming models, which all assume a constant input from the sun, and failed policies based on the incorrect global warming/evil CO2/oil shortage assumption, will give the 'PTB' the opening they need to put the conservatives back in power, thereby checking the soon-to-be-powerful dems. What's more, the failure of "science" will foster a mistrust of real science in the general public, keeping us ignorant and controllable.
Some of you might point out that even if the top 1% have a greater portion of the wealth now than they did 50 years ago, our standard of living has steadily improved (at least in Europe and America). This is true in many respects, such as the portion of our income we spend on food, access to communication, healthcare technology, etc. It's false in many others, however, such as quality of food (tasted a tomato lately?) and quality of communication (TV, blogs, and underfunded print media narrowly focused on national issues, vs. community clubs like the Elks and Lions and well funded print media focused on local issues). Plus, you have to take into account opportunity cost. How much more could our lives have improved had government made better decisions.
What's more, we've become dependent on a system controlled by a select few. Healthcare is better, but you'd better keep working or you won't be able to see a doctor when you need to. Home 'ownership' is up when you ignore mortgages, but real debt-free ownership is way down. Water and Mineral rights are independent of land, so even those who think they own land can have it effectively taken away at any time. They're handing out plenty of fish but jealously guarding the poles and nets.
Remember, it's not the guy with the thin black mustache you've got to watch out for. If he were evil, he'd be a complete failure because he looks it. The truly successful evil person is the ones that convinces his victims that he's not good. As I said, my tinfoil hat is the 10-gallon kind.
Agreed, this is /., a community full of armchair scientists. At least use SI units!
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
They use phrases like "it suggests", and "gives support to" rather than phrases like "statistically significant".
Actually, the Fourth Assessment Report produced in 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a report with several hundred scientific contributors and co-authors, uses phrases like "very high confidence" and "very likely".
"There is very high confidence that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming" (p. 37)
"Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations" (p. 39)
Yes. Google for "little ice age". That's the last time there was a serious drop in solar activity. Basically, sunspots are a proxy for activity in the solar furnace: the fewer sunspots, the lower the sun's energy output. Less solar output means less solar heating of Earth and lower global temperatures. One month isn't going to make a difference, but if the sun goes into a prolonged period of low activity (lasting a full solar cycle or more) we'll notice the results.
Best technique: Wait two weeks. The Sun's rotation is about 27 days.
My test of whether someone is genuinely concerned about catastrophe rather than power over others, is not passed by offering voluntary "carbon offsets" that have questionable impact anyway and aren't subject to 3rd party auditing.
To pass it, the alarmist would have to advocate replacing all measures to combat CO2 emissions, with some method of internalization of the environmental costs (possibly with a subsidy to those that remove it from the atmosphere). That means they would advocate:
-No subsidies for specific technologies.
-No efficiency mandates.
-No banning of products on the grounds that they are "inefficient".
-No subsidies for ethanol.
In other words, make people pay for the mess they make, and then let the market, armed with this price signal, ferret out the easiest places to make the reductions. (90% of them happen before any end user actually makes a decision: Wal-mart reducting truck wind drag, Tide shipping a more concentrated detergent, products being shipped from nearer places, etc.)
Al Gore therefore does not pass. And "buying" credits from your own business certainly doesn't qualify for praise.
There's a general point to made here: unilateral reduction of fossil fuel use is really an empty gesture. Since there are millions of uses that fossil fuels could be put to, you're simply allowing some person with different ethics to go buy what you didn't so they can go ahead with the use they had planned for it. So unless we all act in unison to internalize the CO2 emission costs for everyone, all we're really doing is turning over the fuel to someone else.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Of course the CO2 emissions have been almost flat under the environment friendly Bush administration versus the vicious Earth-rapers Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Look at this speadsheat.
I guess this had to happen eventually - the Sun, mother to our own Mother Earth, is having a "spotless" month - the great change is upon her. It can be a difficult adjustment - but it is, after all, a part of life...
Bow-ties are cool.
Until Netcraft confirms this, it hasn't happened.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
> All joking aside, does anyone else get the feeling they're changing the definition of a sunspot just so they can claim it was a spotless month?
Actually my thought was more the opposite. I have made spaceweather.com one of my daily visits. When it looked like a sunspot MIGHT be forming the official sunspot number went from zero to three. Eh? Don't you actually have to have a spot to count it? Then the area of interest went away and they put the number back at zero. Looks like somebody decided somebody jumped the gun and corrected the records.
Now why might this have happened? Why do papers predicting a period of low solar activity fail to be published (see the full articles)? Could it be the same reason scientific papers questioning global warming end careers without ever seeing the light of day? And of couse the refrain from the warmers is "all peer reviewed science supports man made Global Warming!" Science isn't becoming politicized, it IS politicized. Global Warming is the vehicle whereby "Scientific Socialism" is to bring untold political power to the 'elite educated and wise' few, and a rational planned and controlled world to the poor miserable peasants who would otherwise revert to cannibalism (or worse, a life of free markets without the elites) without their enlightened rule. Thus whether it is true or just a fairy tale is a question that must not be permitted to be entertained by 'serious people.' And the quickest way to ensure that is to define the phrase 'serious people' such that it excludes all who disagree with the official party policy.
Democrat delenda est
All, Interesting story but the official numbers are in and there were two days with spots for August (21,22). You can follow all the action at our http://spidr.ngdc.noaa.gov/ website which has SSN back to 1610 (among other indices). No doubt this cycle is unusual in its delayed start though. Regards, Eric
Sunspots do not correlate with solar heating by irradiation in the sense of "the sun feels warm on my skin." However, they do correlate with the degree that the upper atmosphere gets swept by magnetic fields and particles from the sun, and this in turn appears to have an effect upon cloud formation -- changes of 3-4% in cloudiness and concurrent changes in cloud top temperatures have been correlated to the 11 and 22 year solar (sunspot) cycles -- and that affects the amount of energy that reaches the ground. More info here.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No, the problem is obviously Windows Vista, with it's new and improved AeroGlass user interface. "Sunspots are making changes to your system! [Allow] [Cancel]?"
My blog
It's not just the IPCC saying that global warming is likely due to human activities. That conclusion is also endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences, The American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union and its parent organization, the American Institute of Physics, the national science academies of the G8 nations, Brazil, China, and India. and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Very few scientists seem to disagree.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
STEREO A and B are more than 70 degrees apart, so you'd only need to wait 8.25 days from when it leaves the sight of STEREO A 'til it's seen by STEREO B. In a few years, we'll have real-time view of the far side of the sun. (until they come back around near Earth again)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
> Where is your evidence of valid "scientific papers questioning global warming ending careers without ever seeing the light of day"?
Start with the article linked by Slashdot, then wander over here, then Google is yer friend:
National Post: The Deniers
Democrat delenda est
1. It is global. Not regional. Arctic is continuing to warm despite "cold in my area" bull.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7585645.stm
2. We know *SHIT* about mars climate.
3. Solar output is monitored.
It is really sad when these deniers bring out Mars as their joker card when they are talking about Global Warming. Just few years ago they were saying that there is not enough data on EARTH to even say that EARTH was warming. But given one or two data points on other planet from REMOTE INDIRECT OBSERVATION and they launch themselves to conclusions about it.
It is sad that these people justify their positions by their "beliefs" without knowing or understanding any data.
Is it SO difficult to go to the library, you know, sit down and read the temperature read some books about expeditions to the arctic? Number of people that died trying to conquer it?? Now we have people kayaking to the damn north pole!!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7588329.stm
But no, there is no global warming. The ice just "went because god made it so"
You're invoking a rightwing Canadian paper's column that's anchored on a statistician whose official report to the government, disagreeing with some climate science, wasn't peer reviewed by anyone except some people he picked himself to review it. A disagreement that he backed up by saying the statisticians he disagreed with are "isolated from the statistics community". But yet you're claiming that the ones who disagree with those stats are buried and ignored.
That's quite a mess. Tell me more about Capricorn One: why isn't that front page news, since those Moon landings are a hoax.
--
make install -not war
The Powers That Be [PTB] (the queen, the rothchilds' the Colonel, etc.) What are you, some sort of La Rouche idiot?
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Well, I'm certainly no expert on gaming the mod system here, but I believe that "Underrated" gives karma, and has the valuable side effect of not being a blatant lie. YMMV.
Now, "Funny" would have been perfectly appropriate. And as much as it pains me to say it, when I've posted something funny I have always wished people would use the appropriate moderation. I've earned my karma the hard way: whoring for it. And that's not the same as class-clowning it.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
To pass it, the alarmist would have to advocate replacing all measures to combat CO2 emissions, with some method of internalization of the environmental costs (possibly with a subsidy to those that remove it from the atmosphere). That means they would advocate:
-No subsidies for specific technologies.
-No efficiency mandates.
-No banning of products on the grounds that they are "inefficient".
-No subsidies for ethanol.
Yeah, that sounds fantastic, except for the whole "internalizing externalities" thing. How exactly are you going to determine what the environmental impact of everything is, convert that into a "cost", and force everyone to pay it every time they do something with such a cost such that economics automatically gives incentives to lower environmental impact?
And remember, you have to do it in such a way that the definition of environmental cost can't be manipulated and skewed to the benefit of some at the expense of others, or it's no better than the techniques you disdain.
Wal-Mart and Tide are becoming more efficient because of the rising price of fuel, and the price of fuel has very little if anything to do with the environmental impact of fossil fuels. If it did, the price would be even higher. But how much higher? Do you know? Does anyone? What should the price of gas be in order to fully internalize the environmental impact so as to make your vision a reality?
While you're figuring that out, over the last 20+ years efficiency and emissions mandates have made a real impact -- ask anyone who lived in LA in the 80s. And subsidies for 'green' energy have caused the amount of energy produced in the U.S. through clean methods to increase much faster than it would have otherwise. I'd argue that those subsidies at least for wind power are no longer necessary, but I also can't deny their effects. On the other hand ethanol in this country is nothing but a cynical gift to the already fat and bloated corn lobby that will hurt more than it helps.
So in theory I agree with you 110%. The ultimate solution is to internalize environmental costs. But until you can turn the buzzword into a practical plan, don't go around saying that anyone who is proposing some other specific method of helping the environment doesn't really care about the environment and is only after power. Some are bad -- ethanol is purely a power/money grab, and carbon credits are a silly idea. Others aren't -- emissions and efficiency standards have a real impact, and subsidies for clean energy help replace dirty energy when it's otherwise not economical to do so. Perfect? No. Practical? Can be. Real? Yes, which is more than I can say for the ideal solution, as great as it is in theory.
The enemies of Democracy are
Taoism and the Environment
Bhudism and the Envirnment
Islam and the Environment
Christianity and the Environment
And that's only a small selection of the articles and discussions. I think the thing you are missing is the same thing many miss but the poster I was actually replying to pointed out:
Few actually follow the tenets of their religion in all matters. Regardless of what our upbringing tells us, we can and often do act or believe in a manner contrary to it .
However, I believe my point still stands. The vast majority of established religions include the idea that it is our responsibility (for whatever reason as my "summarily wiped out" comment was factiousness) to use and preserve the resources of this world.
A) There is no evidence to suggest that invisible space goats even exist, except for your written reference to them. There is sufficient evidence that humans exist.
B) There is no evidence that hypothetical invisible space goats have belly button lint. There are measurements of how much greenhouse pollution human activity generates.
C) There is no evidence that belly button lint from an invisible space goat should affect our climate. There is sufficient evidence that greenhouse pollution is indeed greenhouse pollution, and the amount added to our atmosphere is (more than*) enough to cause the global warming that we are measuring.
*It is widely believed but rarely reported that global warming over the past century had been dampened significantly by an opposing global dimming effect caused by particulate pollution.
There is no such thing as proof in the sense you probably mean, but in this case, there is far more evidence on the side of human activity causing global warming than there is for belly button lint of invisible space goats causing global warming.
Here is an article that may clear up your confusion about the 'hockey stick', if that's not enough then you can always ask M.Mann to set you straight.
Notice that contrary to your assertion that there is some sort of conspiracy to stiffle critics and ruin their carers, Mann's web site goes to the trouble of pointing out it's own critics in the "other opinions" section on the RH side of the page.
Skepticisim: First you post an "insightfull" anti-science troll worthy of M.Chrichton, then you do exactly what you claim this cospiracy is doing by backing up your claim with politically inspired psuedo-science regurgitated from a right-wing rag. That is not skepticisim, it is in fact what phycologists call "projection".
Occam's razor: Would indicate that it is YOU allowing YOUR politics to intefere with science and this global conspiracy of which you speak is nothing but a figment of your imagination brought about by your apparent inability to be skeptical of your own assumptions.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.