Guest post by David Archibald at Watts Up With That
Solar Cycle 24 is now three years old and predictions of the date of solar maximum have settled upon mid-2013. For example, Jan Janssens has produced this graph predicting the month of maximum in mid-2013, which is 54 months after the Solar Cycle 23/24 minimum in December 2008:
For those of us who wish to predict climate, the most important solar cycle attribute is solar cycle length. Most of the curve-fitting exercises such as NASA’s place the next minimum between 2020 and 2022 (eg: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/06/nasas-november-solar-prediction/). Solar minimum in December 2022 would make Solar Cycle 24 fourteen years long, which in turn would make the climate of the mid-latitudes over Solar Cycle 25 about 1.0°C colder than the climate over Solar Cycle 24.
You can read the rest HERE. I found this rather interesting:
That would be an exceptionally long solar cycle. The most recent cycle that neared that length was the seventeen years from the maximum of Solar Cycle 4 to the maximum of Solar Cycle 5. Prior to that, the Maunder Minimum had some very long solar cycles as interpreted from C14 data:
It is looking like Cycles 24 and 25 are going to be longer than normal. The questions is will this result be a cooler earth?
The Next Grand Minimum 
Solar Cycle 24 may reach a max in a shorter time leading some to think it’s a shorter solar cycle.
While a lot of new knowledge about solar cycles have emerged in our recent decades, it is still uncertain as to what is really going to unfold this year. The early max peak of SC24 may be a sort of truncating of the cycle as the solar Gauss plummets below 1500. The downside of SC24 may stretch the cycle out to 18 years, as predicted by some. What will be tested too is how much cooling will actually occur and by when. If the cooling of past solar cycle history prevails, this could very significantly represent the death knell of global warming.