Global cooling

The sun obviously does have an effect on the climate; the lack of sunspot activity merely means that the coming warming won't be as strong as it would've been: the CO2 continues to rise in the atmosphere so the warming is inevitable. At some point in our future, the sun's output will be so strong that it will be the driver of our climate - we could have zero ppm of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the temps will be frying us anyway unless we find a way to block the energy hitting the earth (we'll turn into Venus essentially). In the past, high CO2 and other greenhouse gases is all that kept us from turning into Mars - it's been a fortuitous series of events that have kept our climate within ranges for recovery from freezing into Mars or runaway greenhouse effects turning us into Venus, and allowing the diversity of life to occur that we've witnessed in the fossil record and that lives today. What worries environmental activists and climatologists, and makes them sound all "doom and gloom" at times, is that there's virtually no effort made to reduce our fossil fuel use and if we were to extract and burn all fossil fuels currently locked in the earth, there is a good possibility of creating runaway greenhouse effect - a la Venus.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news ... al-warming
Scientists say rare drop in sunspot activity could cause global cooling
June 15, 2011

But scientists warn that the temperature change due to a decline in sunspot activity would likely be minimal and not enough to compensate for global warming.

"A new Maunder-type solar activity minimum cannot offset the global warming caused by human greenhouse gas emissions," wrote authors Georg Feulner and Stefan Rahmstorf, AFP reports.

"Moreover, any offset of global warming due to a grand minimum of solar activity would be merely a temporary effect, since the distinct solar minima during the last millennium typically lasted for only several decades or a century at most."

Edit to add: http://topicfire.com/share/The-Sun-may- ... 54494.html
The Sun may be headed for a little quiet time

However (isn’t there always a "however"?), back in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, there was a crippling cold snap in Europe called the Little Ice Age, and it coincided with a time of almost no sunspots or other solar activity (called the Maunder Minimum). The connection still isn’t all that clear — for example, North America had climate issues too, but not as severe as Europe, and while the winters in Europe were terrible, the summers weren’t all that much cooler. Apparently there were other factors, including volcanic eruptions and an unusually weak jet stream (which is affected by ozone production in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, which in turn was lowered due to lower solar activity!), amplifying this effect. You can read about this in detail in my book Death from the Skies!

Mind you, these indicators don’t say much about the long-term magnetic health of the Sun; only that we may experience a weak peak in 2013 and a weaker or delayed peak the time around. After that, who knows?

Also, it seems very unlikely to me that we might experience another global cooling period due to this weakened sunspot cycle, but it shows you that there are very sensitive effects going on here that are very difficult to predict — and let me take this chance here to say that no, the Sun is not responsible for global warming, as has been shown fairly conclusively . It can mildly amplify or suppress such things, but is not the main driver of it. If it were, we’d see very strong correlations between the climate and solar activity on a decade-by-decade basis (or even shorter as sunspots form and dissipate over the course of days and weeks). We don’t, and therefore the Sun is not the culprit.

OmniScience wrote: More evidence of how little we know about the sun and it's influence on our planet.

There's plenty that is known - check it out!
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... 2nd-round/

We have already discussed the connection between solar activity ( here , here , here , and here ), and this new analysis does not alter our previous conclusions: that there is not much evidence pointing to the sun being responsible for the warming since the 1950s.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... -sunspots/

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... te-change/

http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-a ... arming.htm
Temperature vs solar activity

SS109 wrote: Maybe God is balancing out the human heat islands with a weakened sun?

Human heat islands is an artificial, very localized phenomena that has been accounted for in AGW models. It's a term used only by contrarians who try to confuse the issue of global warming by claiming that temperature measurements aren't being uncorrected for and global temps therefore have been overestimated. The sun has a global effect, and when climatologists speak of global warming, they mean the averaged entire earth temps - not one region or another (for example, did you know that the Arctic itself has already warmed by an average of 3°C compared to the average of 0.6°C for the whole earth?)

SS109 wrote: It will be interesting to see if heat miser or cold miser guesses right about the effect of decreased solar/sunspot activity. How many decades of good solar research & climate causality do we have to look at?

The more comprehensive, and precise data has come since satellites were launched.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy09osti/45375.pdf

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/solar.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation