You are spot on right when you write:
"Isn't it safe to assume that if it's the sun - and it probably is, that statistically it's unlikely we're at an extreme end - and it's more likely this is a normal but someone expansive pattern?"
It often seems like even climatologist think that all the sun ever does is this 11 year roller coaster ride; however, there is data to support longer solar cycles than the 11 year one, which is to say underlaying patterns in solar activity.
If you go to that last link which leads to the "The RC Theory: SSRC Research Report 1-2008" you will see what I mean. The potential existence of 100 or 200 year cycles for the sun is now the basis for that article's prediction that this solar cycle, SC24, will be the start of a new Dalton Minimum kind of event. Even NASA, which is sold out for consensus science, seems to be taking the position that SC25 will be the start of a minimum lasting several decades.
Just as an aside, I've repeated in this thread that a flux value of 64-68 is as low as things get; however, that is not necessarily true. It is as low as has been measured in the roughly 60 years that these particular measurements have been taken. But that does not mean that the sun cannot go LOWER than a value of 64-68 since no sunspots is no sunspots no matter if the flux value is 68 or 50. If it can get lower, and if there is some form of stellar hibernation as NASA speaks of where it might get lower, and it does, then it should be a VERY BAD thing for us.
Either way, Mr.Watts corrective statement — which I included for the sake of good form — looks a bit like timidity ... as if he doesn't want to be seen as categorically saying that AGW is naught but hot air (which is the logical inference from that one BLOG post of his).
Another aside, I wish "blockquote" would actually put a box around the quote like other forums do.“This period of solar inactivity also corresponds to a climatic period called the Little Ice Age when rivers that are normally ice-free froze and snow fields remained year-round at lower altitudes.” It was called the Maunder Minimum, after Edward Maunder, a British accountant who saw a sunspot “like a tack in the Sun” while he was walking home, and subsequently made counting and analyzing sunspots, rather than money, his life’s work. There have been other Minimums. The Dalton Minimum of 1800 to 1810 was that period when Napoleon had his unfortunate encounter with the Russian winter. If there were such a thing as a perfect storm, this might be it. Cooling earth, raising food prices, rampant unemployment, political instability, a politicized scientific community - - our metaphorical "unfortunate encounter with the Russian winter"...