“Well, the solar max is going to occur in 2012-2014 and go for another decade or so.” How do you know? What if it is AWOL? I saw an article on this (we are all dooned in 2011)posted on Drudge and I think this is being touted to draw away from some of the good questions people are starting to ask the GW crowd. Solar predictions said we wouldn’t have the lull we did for as long as we have so I’m sticking with observations not projections. Another thing to remeber in this is what we count for sunspots kills any historical comparison. Specs visible to a telescope wouldn’t have been counted for most (almost all)of the historical record.
Here is an interesting link showing how the current sun cycle lines up with the 1816 year without summer:
http://tvpclub.blogspot.com/2010/12/sunspots-prediction-of-new-dalton.html