I've been doing a bit of mooching about, looking at what may be in store for us in terms of future climate as a result of the current sunspot minimum. Dr Hathaway said in late July that a Dalton style minimum with a peak of around 50 is possible ( http://www.gopexiles.com/?p=2760 ), and officially he and his NASA bunch have predicted a peak of 90 ( http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/29may_noaaprediction.htm ). My own thoughts are that we will end up around 55-65ish.
With that in mind, here is a graph illustrating the smoothed sunspot activity over the last 400 years:
As you can see the peaks during the Dalton minimum were around 55 and then 95. Taking a look at the temperature in Europe only over the last 1000 years:
You can see that the Dalton minimum coincided with the so-called 'Dickens winters', where the temps across Europe were around 0.25c below the 1900-1999 mean.
If we are moving towards another Dalton-type minimum we might expect temps across Europe to dip from the current level of approx. 0.15c above mean to around 0.25c below mean - a swing of 0.4c. If we take AGW into account, I don't think it's too liberal to theorise a swing of 0.3c.
What might this mean for us in Britain? Well the mean annual CET for the period 1971-2000 is 9.75c. A downward adjustment of 0.3c results in a mean annual CET of 9.45c, not unlike the 1980's (average annual CET - 9.52C).
Needless to say this is all harmless supposition and a lot depends on the depth of minimum and subsequent amplitude of maximum, but I have tried to be as impartial as I can possibly be - you can be the judge as to the success of this or not!! http://nwstatic.co.uk/forum/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/laugh.gif