“That solar sinking feeling“. Anthony Watts tries to imply that the beginning of the end of the current, and somewhat unusual, solar minimum is going to lead to global cooling.
The denialists like to ignore the fact that these cycles are of sunspot activity, not energy output. They have no significance for Earth’s climate except in the wild theories of goof-ball amateurs.
But all those charts sure look “sciencey”.
Wott's Up With That? 
Isn’t there some correlation between sunspot activity and solar energy? I thought some studies had showed up to a .2 wm2 forcing difference between the bottom and peak of a solar cycle? I know it’s not much but it’s something. I also thought a recent paper showed a 6-9 month lag between solar activity and earth temps responding which means that we should be experiencing the ‘cooling’ now. And if this is cooling, well, ouch.
[The variation in solar energy output is actually very constant, as I showed in this post about a spaceweather alert. – Ben]
Hang on. Joe Romm is always banging on about how solar activity was in a long minimum and that 2010/2011 is set to be the hottest on record precisely because solar activity is heading up again. In fact, I thought that one of the strongest rebuttals to contrarians declaring the end of “statistically significant” global warming over the last decade was to say that solar activity has been in a minimum over that time.
[Low sunspot activity has been weakly correlated with climate cooling. The sunspot cycle we are now leaving should have meant that natural inputs have been favoring cooling, but in fact warming has been accelerating. Skeptical Science discusses this. Actual solar insolation (i.e. energy input) is practically flat. – Ben]