Is it just me or does sunlight seem dimmer than it used too? I know it's as hot as hell, but the sky always seems hazy to me and I don't remember the sky being hazy w/ extrememly high temps before.

To me it's been just the opposite, brighter, or just "whiter." Major solar storms the last week and humidity has been high so it's naturally hazy.

Here's some great news about the sun...we're entering an active solar flare period.



http://gawker.com/5556692/the-newest-threat-to-all-human-life-on-earth-solar-storms

"In 1859, a geomagnetic storm sparked by a huge solar flare swept over the Earth. Telegraph wires shorted out and set houses on fire. A brilliant aurora was seen in Hawaii—so bright that "people could read newspapers by [its] red and green glow." Scientists predict that in May 2013, the sun's solar cycle will peak at about the same level as in 1859. Get ready for space weather!

Next week, scientists will meet at the Space Weather Enterprise Forum in DC to talk about how to prevent civilization from being destroyed in the next few years by solar storms. The ability to monitor and predict so-called "space weather"—solar flares, interplanetary magnetic fields, etc.—is a relatively new capability. But what scientists have found is sort of unsettling. They predict a marked increase in solar storms over the next few years. According to NASA scientist Richard Fisher: "The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity."

This is bad news for anyone who likes electronic things. As Fisher says, "Our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms." That's because today we're so dependent on technology hooked up to satellites, which can be disabled or destroyed by huge waves of charged particles spit out by the sun during a solar storm: GPS, cell phones—even credit card transactions use a satellite. In a worst-case simulation, reported by NPR, a particularly severe solar storm not only took out the majority of commercial satellites, it also charged power lines to the point where transformers blew all over the world, "leaving millions of people in northern latitudes without power."