Yeah , the scientists called that the "Maunder Minimum".
I have the impression that the lack of solar flares, and resulting lack of magnetism impacts on flowing air currents (which come from the West, and going easterly)
thus failing to oscillate between hemispheres to temper the weather / climate / rainfall, etc.).
That would also impact on the amount of snowfall (soil moisture), rainfall (soil moisture, underground groundwater reserves) as well as moderating ambient air temperatures.
Maybe Joe Bastardi (climatologist)at weatherbell.com will address some of these issue in his upcoming Saturday summary tomorrow
since this is recent news and supports his anti-global warming thesis.
Direct solar activity is something that humanity has not even had the means to trace until recent decades. Ice core samples show fluctuation in climate that are believable on an old-earth model, at least. But they can only say what it was like on the earth at the corresponding time, not what the sun was directly doing.
Where are the astrophysicists here? It’s been apparently assumed that the Sun as a whole doesn’t dim and flare on the scale of centuries and millennia, but is that actually true of the sun? It is driven, as best our scientists understand it, by nuclear fusion. To my maybe simple mind, it seems there may be layers and pockets of burned and unburned fuel in the body of the Sun that act much like a Lava Lamp does, stirring things up and resulting in variations of gross output (because it is the burning fuel that is causing the output, not some steady state source beneath it as is the case for an actual Lava Lamp).
I flag our secular scientistic sort on such questions, not to present any direct argument about God, but to question popular assumptions about the Sun.
I’d like to even propose a method to examine the core of the Sun, that would work if we could field a craft that would circle the Sun closely and rapidly like Venus and we could wait for a suitable supernova to appear, whose output we could monitor both directly and as it passes through our Sun, with the craft and the Earth as references. The result would be like a kind of crude CAT scan of the Sun.