Even the NY Times is noticing it - sunspots

Finally reaches the attention of the Grey Lady.

Sunspots Are Fewest Since 1954, but Significance Is Unclear
The Sun has been strangely unblemished this year. On more than 200 days so far this year, no sunspots were spotted. That makes the Sun blanker this year than in any year since 1954, when it was spotless for 241 days.

The Sun goes through a regular 11-year cycle, and it is now emerging from the quietest part of the cycle, or solar minimum. But even for this phase it has been unusually quiet, with little roiling of the magnetic fields that induce sunspots.

�It�s starting with a murmur,� said David H. Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA�s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

As of Thursday, the 276th day of the year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration�s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., had counted 205 days without a sunspot.

In another sign of solar quiescence, scientists reported last month that the solar wind, a rush of charged particles continually spewed from the Sun at a million miles an hour, had diminished to its lowest level in 50 years.

I love the headline:

but Significance Is Unclear

DOH! The Sun provides us with the warmth we need to survive. Sunspots are a direct indicator of solar activity (and therefore output). More sunspots = hotter Earth. The Sun has been unusually quiet and the Earth's climate is showing a cooling that even the most rabid AGWers are unable to ignore.