Well, I've read the Tinsley and Yu paper, and I must confess it appears to be a pretty impressive effort to meet the very challenges I set forth above. Although in their abstract they admit the effort is "speculative" involving "possible explanations", that doesn't seem more true here than in any early scientific investigation into a complex problem. At this point the primary obstacle is my own lack of knowledge about global climate issues, so there's not much more I could say except that there do appear to be interesting forcing terms related to the solar cycle. The main question that remains unaddressed by this one paper is whether or not the small cyclical variations encountered could be related to the accumulated climate change affects we've seen in the last century. The way I would phrase that question is, if we accept that solar-cycle variations in clouding and temperature are due to solar activity variations (often solar-wind modulation), do the centruy-long variations in those same proxies explain the century-long climate variations we have seen, or are we mixing apples and oranges when discussing solar-cycle variations and longterm climate change? For example, if global warming has been apparent over the last few solar cycles, why is that effect not overshadowed by a much more obvious cyclical variation required by the hypotheses of this paper? Is it plausible that the solar-wind variations seen over a single cycle, in which the morphology of the solar wind changes considerably, can be dwarfed by the solar-wind variations on the century timescale?