Get your woodpiles stocked up and your fuzzy slippers ready.

The UK MET office has published a study which suggests solar activity is currently plummeting, the fastest rate of decline in 9300 years. The study also raises the odds of Maunder Minimum style conditions by 2050 from 8% to 15 – 20%.

The Maunder Minimum coincided with the middle part of the Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America were subjected to very cold winters. A causal connection between low sunspot activity and cold European winters has recently been made using the longest existing surface temperature record, the Central England Temperature record  and also using the ERA-40 re-analysis dataset.  A potential explanation of this has been offered by observations by NASA's Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment, which suggest that solar UV output is more variable over the course of the solar cycle than scientists had previously thought.

Some scientists hypothesize that the dense wood used in Stradivarius instruments was caused by slow tree growth during the cooler period. Instrument maker Antonio Stradivari was born a year before the start of the Maunder Minimum.