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Speaking from a climate science perspective, it's not really news - Paul's summary of the solar side is excellent, but for those who like snowy winters or cold temperatures, don't get your hopes up! The climate forcing of solar variation is quite small - it's just about enough to create variations in a stable climate, and provides variations on top of our long slow Milankovitch cooling from the Holocene Optimum, but it's a small change compared to the CO2 forcing of industrialisation over the past century or so. See Feulner and Rahmstorf 2010 for a full paper on the exact subject! After we've set monthly global temperature records just about every month for the past year, you'd think people would realise it's not cooling. But I don't suppose News Corp journalists would be interested in evidence...
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