It's not like skeptics of global warming haven't been pointing to the sun as a possible factor in global warming. But now that temperatures have been falling for 10 years it looks like maybe others are starting to notice.

Could reduced sunspots be tied to temperatures on Earth?

That's what has astrophysicists and meteorologists wondering as the sun enters a prolonged "quiet period," a deviation from the usual 11-year sunspot cycle in which the dark blobs on our star's surface ebb and flow, reports National Geographic News.

And there may be a link to global warming -- or, in this case, cooling. Current theories link an earlier solar quiet time to the "Little Ice Age," a cold snap that lasted from about 1300 to 1800 in Europe and North America...

The Maunder Minimum, a period of extremely low sunspot activity from about 1645 to 1715, coincided with the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, when Dutch canals regularly froze during the winter.

This past January, the Dutch canals again froze, for the first time in 16 years.

Imagine that, the hottest object in the solar system possibly being linked to global warming and/or cooling? Maybe it's not us humans causing climate change but that huge, hot ball of fire in the middle of the solar system? Who would've thought! Really, isn't this just common sense?

I guess not, because later in the same article:

"There are many uncertainties," Jose Abreu, a doctoral candidate in Switzerland, tells National Geographic News. "We don't know the sensitivity of the climate to changes in solar intensity. In my opinion, I wouldn't play with things I don't know."

If we don't know the sensitivity of climate to changes in solar intensity, aren't there too "many uncertainties" related to trying to predict climate change at all?

It seems to me that trying to predict climate change without knowing the sensitivity of the climate to the sun is trying to predict how a bottle will float across the Atlantic ocean without knowing how ocean currents will effect the route. Trying to predict something without understanding arguably the biggest variable seems absurd to me.