Solar cycle #24 revisited

[tusenfem]

It was pointed out to me that there are members who would like to discuss the solar cycles, and that they were taken away this possibility by my closing the old thread.

Therefore, I open this new thread to discuss this topic, with the restriction that only when william is willing to actually address and respond to claims to his postings he is allowed to post in this thread.

I wish you all a pleasant discussion on this intriguing topic.
Closing off with a very nice picture of the Sun with lots of "pockmarks" on its surface

[nota]

if the cycle really does decline to a minimum
how much of a drop in global temps will result ?

and on the flip side
how high can our stars output go in normal form
ie no red giant billions of years away stuff
but just normal up tick to max output
possible in the next few years

[Torsten]

I don't know how much of a temperature drop the Earth would experience if the sun went into a prolonged minimum, given the steady warming signal from CO₂. The Maunder Minimum that lasted from 1645 to 1715 occurred approximately during the middle of the Little Ice Age, which extended at least 100 years before and after this period.

Over the last few solar cycles the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) has varied between ~1365.5 W/m² and ~1366.5 W/m², or ~0.07%, as you can see in this chart.

A recent paper by Foster & Rahmstorf examined five different global temperature records and identified the effects of El Nino/Southern Oscillation, atmospheric aerosols, and TSI. Their analysis indicates that the range of the TSI effect on the surface temperature is about 0.08C and about 0.18C on the temperature of the lower troposphere (as inferred from satellite measurements). The last chart on this blog post by one of the authors illustrates the effect of TSI variation (or you can view it directly here).