Guest essay by David Archibald at Watts Up With That
Solar cycle 24 has seen very low solar activity thus far, likely the lowest in 100 years.
Figure 1: F10.7 Flux 2014 – 2017
The F10.7 flux shows that over the last three and a half years the Sun has gone from solar maximum through a bounded decline to the current stage of the trail to the minimum. Solar minimum is likely to be still three years away.
The Full Post is HERE. Stay tuned. It was a record snow year in California and cosmic ray counts continue to increase. It is going to be an interesting climate year.
The Next Grand Minimum 
According to solen.info: The first spot of the solar cycle 25 observable in a resolution of 1K was detected during the early hours of the morning of August 28. At noon, the position of the region (S5775) was N43W14. By the end of the day, the region had fallen, and therefore it had no more points internally. The appearance of the 25 cycle spots suggests a possible solar minimum during the second half of 2018.
The significance of the overlap between SC24 and SC25 relates to the possibility of mutual anihilation of the magnetic fields from the two inner solar dynamos on phase opposition as predicted by Prof. Valentina Zharkova’s proposal.