Interesting. A Grand Minimum in solar activity would significantly effect the climate - to cool it.

Solar scientists are now seriously considering the possibility that we are at the start of a Grand Minimum.

Only a slight exaggeration

The consequences of this possibility will be profound. First, it will afford scientists a golden opportunity to study the Sun as it behaves in a manner unprecedented since the advent of the space age. They now have the right tools to conduct this research, and what they will learn will hopefully help explain why a star like the Sun behaves as it does.

Second, and as important, experiencing a grand minimum will finally help confirm the Sun’s influence on the climate. Past data strongly suggests a global cooling of the climate during past grand minimums, followed by warming during times of high sunspot activity. This data however is somewhat uncertain. If the climate cools during a new grand minimum, as many scientists predict and as much recent data appears to confirm, this will help clarify this fact.

More importantly , it will also force the climate science community to stop focusing solely on atmospheric carbon dioxide as the only factor influencing the Earth’s climate temperature. In recent years, for numerous political reasons, they have become obsessed with carbon dioxide to the exclusion of all else, to a point that some are even tampering with data to make it fit their theories.

Yet, carbon dioxide remains a trace gas in the atmosphere, despite its increase in recent years. In fact, of all the players that produce global warming it is a minor player. By far water in the atmosphere does almost all the work, and if it wasn’t there the climate would be ten to twenty degrees cooler.

Every single one of the global warming models admit this. Those models don’t call for the increased CO2 to directly warm the atmosphere. Instead, they claim that it will cause “feedback” with the atmosphere’s water, causing it to act to warm the climate.

None of these models have so far worked. All have failed to predict the climate’s fluctuations in the past two decades. The differences so far have not been enough however to force climate scientists to rethink their theories.

Should a grand minimum happen and be accompanied by a significant cooling, however, it will shatter these models entirely, and it will expose the data tampering for all to see. This in turn will hopefully result in a house-cleaning and shake-up within that climate science community, resulting in a refreshing new look at the Earth’s climate, less influenced by the politics that have been warping it.

Thus, a grand minimum will not only teach us a lot about the Sun and the climate. It might very well allow for a new renaissance within the scientific community, forcing out the religious believers in human-caused global warming who for the past three decades have squelched all debate.

Instead, a grand minimum will allow the real scientists, open to the actual data and not shackled to their pet theories, to shine, to put them in a position to once again run the show.