The solar minimum comes roughly every 11 years. Do you remember the freezes we had on the last one? What was it, three days straight of freezes? I had to crop my Christmas Palms at the core to get them to come back. The solar intensity drops like 0.35% or something, so we can measure it, but not the overall impact. Also, the other factors really make it hard to map it all out. El Nino, La Nina, different ocean current cycles, etc. I have a buddy doing a PhD on it and he is a much better mathematician than I and he says there are too many variables. Some of the "extended" Solar minimum devotees make some pretty heinous assumptions about the average temperatures and gradients through the vertical cut of our atmosphere, and that really crimps their accuracy (extrapolation). I do like that they have figured out it is a "tidal" phenomenon (saturn, earth, etc) for the 11 year cycle. Yeah, we are still learning, and I take the position that we are just along for the ride. Way too much CO2 though. Definitely not a good thing.