1

Been keeping an eye on this ever since Fallen Angels came out in 1991 (new ice age coupled with anti-tech, socialist government -- not that that could ever happen here). 

Pellet stove in the basement, down comforters & jackets all round... plus plenty of guns, ammo and canned goods, too.

Whenever there's data such as this, Glenn Reynolds invariably cites FA, too.  As well he might this post of yours.

2 It's a case of "I sincerely hope I'm wrong".  While Jim Hansen and his Prophet Al Gore is still selling their snake oil, we can't help but noticed that the world is getting colder.  PDO (the 30 year cycle of long term Pacific ocean phases) have flipped to cold phase.  The previous time when we're in a cold phase is in the 70s, and back then these very same Warmists are talking about coming Ice Age. 

But the sunspot count is very troubling indeed.  Sun will do as it please, politic be damned.

3

Do I have this right? The way I understand the cause-and-effect goes like this:

A lot of times clouds need something to seed them. Conditions may be such that clouds are possible, but without some sort of seed to start the process, the clouds may not form on their own. Seeds can be silver iodide (legendarily) or dust or any of several other things, but one of the most common seeds is cosmic ray traces. The atmosphere is a giant cloud chamber.

The rate at which cosmic rays arrive at the earth is a function of the solar wind. When it's strong, fewer arrive. When it's weak, a lot do.

The strength of the solar wind correlates with sunspot activity. When the surface of the sun roils, more gas is expelled.

So when there are few sunspots, the solar wind is weak, so more cosmic rays strike the earth, and there's more cloud formation.

Clouds increase the planet albedo, resulting in more sunlight being bounced back into space, and less striking the surface and turning to heat, so the planet cools.

Is that the theory?

4 I cannot bring myself to believe that the solar wind affects cosmic rays enough to affect anything. It goes down to this: if you cut a cone starting in the center of Earth and ending at the solar system's shockwave, is there more solar wind particles in it than, say, protons and electrons in the upper ionosphere (where collisions cannot create clouds)? I bet you donuts to dollars there isn't, even though the height of the cone is unimaginably enormous. It's a very good vacuum out there. So, the effect described is very small. The most of the effect we see from solar wind comes from the way the wind itself interacts with magnetic field and atmosphere. It's the first order effect.

I have my father's textbook on ionosphere and stuff, which goes into lengths regarding the solari wind, but sadly it does not deal with clouds. They are too low in the dense air for him, sadly. So that's no help.

5 I believe that is a correct statement of a theory. It seems to be controversial, but seeing through the politics-induced noise for climate issues is so hard now that I can't even guess at the credence of the theory or its criticisms. There are still people running around claiming that the world has gotten warmer for the past three years, for pete's sake, which requires some serious data torture.

I've been falling back to the simplest, basic test of science, which is: "Do your predictions come true?", which is what has really been feeding my skepticism lately. We're falling off the bottom of the error bars of the predictions from just a few years ago, and it's distressing to me how few people seem to understand exactly how much of an indictment of the theory that is, namely, it basically disproves the models making those claims.

6 A someone who has always been uncomfortable in any temperature over 78, even back when I was skinny, "I, for one, welcome our Ice Age Overlords!"  <--(I'm beginning to think I spend too much time on Slashdot.)

7 I wonder if there's any relationship between solar minima and global economic recessions...

8

Pete, I think the inverse relationship between the rate of arrival of extra-solar cosmic rays and the solar wind has been confirmed experimentally. After all, we can measure them.

The idea that cosmic rays seed clouds is somewhat more controversial, but apparently not all that much more so. It's a recent theory but I gather it's respected. I gather there's some pretty good hard data about that.

Here's a paper about it.

9 The link between sunspots and temperature is a lot simpler than that:  there are more sunspots when the sun is hotter; and when the sun is hotter the earth gets hotter.

The increased solar wind during sunspot periods does shield the earth from cosmic rays, but I think the indirect effect on climate is small comparted to the direct effect of increased solar irradiance.