Yep, it started, we are in it now, but so far almost a total absence of sun spot activity is all they have to work with. A new cycle starts every 11 years, the spots go up to a peak and then back down to a minimum(varies cycle to cycle)and during the Maunder Minimum there was very little sun spot activity, which coincided with the start of the little ice age.
From what I understand, the solar cycles are also marked by the polarity of the sunspots and that hasn’t changed yet in the few weak ones that temporarily appeared.
Incorrect.
The Maunder Minimum coincided with the peak of the Little Ice Age which is variously dated, but in The Little Ice Age by Brian Fagan is dated from 1300 to 1850 AD. The Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1715 AD was only one of many "minimums" that occured during the Little Age Ice.
Brian Fagan in his tedious review of historical documents during the Little Ice Age, never proposed much of a theory as to why the climate change had occured, but did note that increased rain as well as cooler weather was a hallmark in Europe. The rain left the fields too muddy to plant in Spring and beat down the heavy heads of the cereal grain crops in late summer before they could be harvested. He documents a lot of famine and a lot of disease and then finally the Dutch and then the English after a couple centuries starting to wise up and change their agricultural crops and farming methods to accomodate the changed climate.
For a good theory on why the decreased solar activity leads to not just cooling but more rain, I recommend The Chilling Stars (2nd ed) by Henrik Svensmark.
He gives evidence that decreased solar activity causes decreased magnetic field protection causes more cosmic rays (charged particles from old supernovae) penetrating Earth's atmosphere causing more bombarded atoms in our atmosphere to be ionized causing these more charged atoms to attract water molecules (like seeding a cloud) and thus form low lying cloud cover which reflects heat back into space and cools the Earth while also producing more rain.