It would be nice if references to the research talked more about the... research.
Anyway, this isn’t really a “no duh”, this has to do with magnetic fields allowing cosmic rays to seed the formation of clouds. This is CLOUD formation we are talking about. A big big deal when it comes to adjusting the average temperature or a long period of time say over the course of a century. Depending on the activity of the sun and it’s magnetic fields, we may see more or less cloud cover over decades which pretty much sums up ALL of the upward or downward trends.
This is awesome science since it gives us another way to predict temps being over or under median and explains why the earth actually sees temp differences other than the simple seasons every year.
In short, it is NOT mainly from anything happening on or under the earth. Some cataclysmic events like massive volcanoes may alter things for a few years at a time, but it’s the SUN that is driving cloud formation.
Awesome.
Note also: the correlation between solar activity and global temperature has been described numerous times in the recent past - check out some of the graphs in this paper from 1991:
http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html