so, why do we have winter, anyways?

no, if you don't know look it up. if you think you know, prove yourself right. do this. this isn't phd-level stuff; you should have learned about it in grade school. maybe you did, and just forgot.

but, it's because the amount of sunlight hitting the earth fluctuates, causing changes in the upper atmosphere that allow cold air to move from the polar regions into the habitable regions. this 'polar vortex' is called winter. 

so, realizing that, what would you predict is the result of the sun hitting historical lows in output? more winter, right? and, the correlation is there, if you go to look for it - as it was from antiquity until 1980, when it split due to increased carbon concentrations.

you won't find a scientist that contradicts the obvious. this isn't specialist knowledge, it's grade school science. what you'll find instead is a lot of talking around the basic point, because it's been so obfuscated by deniers. what you're doing to these scientists when you bring up the sun in a non-academic context is triggering them into bad memories that they've had of dumb arguments with scientific illiterates trying to pass themselves off as educated. you're forcing them to relive traumatic experiences, and not getting good answers out of them, because of it. they're more focused on not letting bad ideas perpetuate (and there are a lot of them...) than actually getting the right ideas out. so, when you actually bring up good points about the sun's effect on the climate, it gets ignored because they just don't want to talk about it. and, that's a failure that the talking heads need to address, because the sun is actually going through a phase right now where it's output is low enough that it will (regionally) offset the effects of global warming, at least for a while. if legitimate climate scientists don't take steps to address the point clearly and honestly, climate change is going to be seen as a theory that fails to make accurate predictions, and we're going to lose the argument - only to get roasted when or if the sun turns itself up. science cannot operate at a propaganda level if it wants to win public support. it has to be honest, and it has to win people over due to it's honest attempts to understand things as they actually are.

here's the thing: this is not as dire as people are likely to intuitively think. it's a modelling issue. it doesn't require a rethink to solve, it requires a tweak. the reality is that we don't understand the sun all that well, so we mostly model it as constant. we even have a term called the solar constant. but, the sun's output is not constant, and nobody is going to argue that it is.

what legitimate climate scientists need to do is put more effort into modelling the sun and then work those fluctuations into the models. remember: small changes in solar output can make big differences in the upper atmosphere. think of the way the sun hits the earth as a lightning strike on a lake - it ripples. and, that's where the "amplification" actually happens. in this case, what we're talking about is a decrease in total energy entering the system - and we understand how this works fairly well, with the oscillations taking repetitive shapes that are predictable functions of the solar output.

unlike the deniers, i would not expect that a better modelling of the sun would create a substantially different understanding of climate change. it's theoretically plausible, i suppose - only way to find out is to do it - but we understand the greenhouse effect, too, and the solar output would probably have to decrease by a larger proportion than is being contemplated in order to offset the effect. the point is that we don't have this model. because we don't understand the sun. the deniers, however, insist that the models can be improved - and that is tautological. they should be met halfway on this point, to prove them wrong, and to better understand the thing, as a whole. what better models - and this is a complexity issue, not a computing issue - would really help us with is in understanding the weather quite a bit better.

this article is an example of how to misunderstand the point:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/09/the-imminent-mini-ice-age-myth-is-back-and-its-still-wrong

i don't really have any corrections to make on the article. but, the scientific claim here, and mike lockwood, who is cited here in an equally poor but oppositely poor context than he is in the right-wing media, has volunteered to be spokesperson for it, is not that the decrease in solar activity will offset global warming but that it will lead to the kind of regional variations that were seen in seventeenth century england. the article is really an elaborate strawman fallacy, rushing to debunk a claim that no scientist has ever made.

it's all very nice and everything to point out that a regional decrease in northern temperatures is likely to be offset by an accompanying increase in southern ones. why do we have winter, again? but, tell it to the guy that's playing hockey on the thames in april, as india suffers through 55 degree heat.

it balances out, so there's nothing to worry about, right? eh....