What I was thinking about when typing that was indeed a model by some geophysicists. They had found some kind of correlation between some function of solar activity and some function of seismic activity, but those functions were so unnatural-looking that I couldn't help thinking they tweaked the crap out of everything before getting a strong-enough result.
You were likely referring to some of the recent work of Vincent Courtillot. A video summarizing some of his work here.
The most interesting aspect of this work, is that Courtillot did not start out with any intention of finding correlations with climate; his field is geomagnetism. Only after noticing certain correlations between geomagnetic cycles and sun spot cycles, did suspected correlations with natural climate cycles become evident.
Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules: