[grey_whiskers]

A good case can be made that since the end of the Medieval Warm Period about 700 years ago the Earth's climate has been trending cooler with just a couple of brief warming trends, the second of which may have just ended.

Details, please? (I have read elsewhere of the declining magnetic field strength of the sun; the predicted effects on Sunspots; and the influence of lowered or missing Sunspot frequency on mean global temperature...)

[citizen]

Yes, those things are thought to indicate a time of cooling.

As for the earth trending cooler that seems to be how it’s going following the Medieval Warm Period. Then we have the Maunder Minimum of the reduced solar activity such as you mentioned from the 1300s into the 1600s. After that is a brief warming period of a few decades. Next, the Dalton Minimum, that was considerably briefer than the Maunder Minimum. That gets us to the current warm period of the last 160 years or so, the last 20 of which may be already be the beginning of another down trend again.

So by a ratio of about 5:2 the trend has been cooling since the MWP. Let’s look at it in about 2100 and see how it went between now and then :)