From a reader:

Yesterday, as one of the articles on NPR’s “The Takeaway,” they were going on about “climate stability,” rather than “global warming” or “climate change” or whatever it is today.
The guy doing most of the talking, some climate blogger from the NYT, was talking about how the entire planet doesn’t experience climate change uniformly, but rather that different parts of the globe experience differnt sorts of climate change, at different rates.
The reason for all this blather eventuallty became obvious: the hurricane season is going into its cyclic lull, which will last for about 30 years, so environmentalists aren’t going to have hurricanes to beat us over the head about climate change. They’re prepping the battlespace for the notion that “even though you have it good, look at these poor people over here.”
So, I think he environmental community is expecting weather patterns to moderate over the US in the next few years, and they’re grasping at whatever they can inorder to remain relevant.
Personally, I think it’s all crap. The Sun is the driver for all the warming or cooling. What we might be doing is roundoff error.

And via Instapundit, we have this story at PhysicsWorld:

Researchers in the US may have discovered further evidence that the Sun is heading towards an extended period of quiet activity, the like of which has not been seen since the 17th century. The impact this may have on climate is poorly understood but it would be good news for satellite communications, which would continue to avoid the harsher impacts of space weather.
Scientists have long known that the Sun’s magnetic activity varies over a cycle of approximately 11 years. Greater magnetic activity leads to more “sunspots”, or darker patches visible on the solar surface. These sunspots are regions where the magnetic field lines have become twisted due to differential rotation in the outer layers of the Sun.
Particularly violent sunspots can result in the sudden release of magnetic energy in the form of solar flares, which cause the outpouring of protons and electrons into space. Some of these particles can reach the Van Allen radiation belt of Earth – the outer region of Earth’s own magnetic field – where they are accelerated to speeds approaching the speed of light. During the solar maxima, when sunspot numbers are at their peak, the abundance of particles shooting around in the radiation belt can become a real hazard to the satellites that reside there.
Extended calm
We were expecting to reach the next solar maxima around 2011–2012. However, space weather experts have been surprised over the past few years to report very few signs that the number of sunspots has been picking up since the last solar minimum in 2006. This has prompted some space scientists to forecast that we are heading towards another prolonged spell of quiet sunspot activity, the last of which was observed between 1645 and 1715 in a period called the “Maunder Minimum”.

I wrote about this stuff here recently.