But the arguments in the work reported there don't make much sense to me. The variation in the output of the sun has only an average effect of 0.1 or 0.2C on temperatures. There are other things around which have much larger effects. Why should that particular effect tend to rearrange the climate to give a cold winter in Britain, rather than other things which have larger effects? No one is giving an answer to that rather telling question.

I'm suspecting statistical coincidence. As has been reported in scientific papers, there are strong reasons to suppose that a substantial proportion of scientific papers reporting statistically significant correlations are in fact random coincidences for two reasons (1) scientists carry out lots of attempted correlations and discard those that don't find anything (2) there is a bias towards publicity for interesting results.

Also it is difficult to be sure that in fact we are arriving in a period of extended low solar activity. Sure we have had an extended and low minimum and it is not the first time that has happened. Solar activity has in fact picked up in the last couple of months. Talk of a new "Maunder minimum" remains utterly speculative.

But there are nonetheless other grounds to suppose we might be arriving in a period of cold winters. When the North Atlantic Oscillation is in negative phase, we tend to get colder winters in NW Europe. It stayed persistently negative from about 1950 to 1970. Nothing to do with output of the sun. So there is no apparent reason it shouldn't get stuck negative for another extended period of a decade or two.