A sun with no sunspots?

Factual Questions
1

This article,A sun with no sun spots? What that could mean for Earth and its climate, discusses the 11-year sunspot cycle most of us have heard about, and also mentions a possible larger, 80-90 year cycle called a “grand minima.”

It appears we could be entering the low-activity period of a grand minima, meaning less sunspot activity and perhaps cooler earth temperatures.

So,

a)Do you believe in the grand minima hypothesis?

b)Will it cool the earth?

Seems like there’d be lots of geologic, tree-ring & ice core evidence if these cycles had much effect.

2

Actually there is historical evidence that the Little Ice Age occurred during Maunder Minimum, but that doesn’t prove it caused it. You have to remember that sunspot records don’t back that far.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum#Little_Ice_Age

Frankly comparisons with the Maunder Minimum seem premature. If you want something scary, read about that about the Carrington Event of 1859.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

3

Too early to say. Certainly, the Maunder Minimum occurred, and we’re not really sure what caused it. It might be something cyclical, and if so we might be re-entering that part of the cycle; or it might be something sporadic, and if so it might be randomly cropping up again now; or it might be that some other phenomenon is causing the current lower activity; or it might be that the current lower activity is just a statistical fluke and doesn’t mean anything. And even if we are re-entering something like the Maunder Minimum, we know very little about the implications of that, since we have a sample size of 1.

4

Vocabulary nitpick re the OP: The effectively-no-sunspots portion of each of these hypothesized longer cycles (as opposed to the well-documented 22-yeaqr double sunspot cycle) is, obviously, a minimum, with the type period the Maunder Minimum. More than one instance of such a minimum are minima, a Latin plural adopted into English.

As Chronos notes, we know very little about the effects of such a cycle. To suggest global cooling from it is only slightly more reasonable than suggesting it led to Swedish expansionism, which also correlates strongly with the Maunder Minimum.