Yes, thanks, it's the minimum seems to have some minute indirect effect on regional temps in winter, but not conclusive. I haven't seen any strong evidence of solar maximum or minimum having any direct effect on melting/freezing.
That is the problem. There is no strong evidence, nothing other than mild anecdotal evidence. The problem, as I see it, is that the arctic is a very chaotic system with many different inputs and many different melt enhancers and melt blockers. It is still, even today, only partially understood.
That does not make it very easy to pick out one signal from the noise.
Personally I'm going to watch this season and the following two with great interest. It was expected that solar cycle 24 would expire around the end of 2017 or early 2018. In fact it started to drop well below the expected trend line early in 2017 and apart from one small peak around October it dropped into Minimum at the end of the year.
Not that I'm saying solar was a single cause of the way the 2017 season went. I'm not. But it has been a long time now that I have watched the two most potent factors in our climate, notably CO2 growth and Solar output.
After the dramatic loss of ice in 2007, the pause of 2008/2009 was hailed by the denialists as a resurgence of ice. 2010 put paid to that idiocy but it is still a fact that those two years were during the lowest solar minimum in close to a century.
So now it is time to watch. The Pacific is anomalously hot, yet the pacific encroachment is stalled. Let us watch and see, however, as Friv puts it, it surely doesn't look like any kind of record right now.