The article mentions 11 year cycles between polar changes... since it hasn't happened this year, this article is based around 19 data points... That's the last 19 data points of the available 409,090,909 11-year increments...
Why not learn a bit about the subject? Stars really are fascinating!
Calculating the orbit of an object in space is well understood and several orders of magnitude less complicated than the relatively poorly understood processes that occur in the sun.
As the person you replied to said, it is hubris to think that after a few hundred years of studying a 4 billion year old dynamic object that we can make such precise predictions about it. The fact that scientists seem to be baffled by the sun's current behavior should make this point obvious.
You might be reading more into science reporting than you should. 'Hm, that's odd' is reported as 'baffled'.
People that actually work in the field do not believe they know it all as you suggest.
The comment I responded to also had a needlessly condescending tone to the OP of "Science doesn't work like that...Why not learn a bit about the subject?" which I also objected to.
I'm afraid you missed my point: the age of the object is irrelevant. That's why I was talking about the Moon which is also billions of years old.
We don't predict how things will behave, simply based on a number of observations and then extrapolating (well, not if we have any choice). Instead we try to understand the underlying physical principles that cause the behaviour in the first place and make predictions based on that.
The hubris is from you assuming you have a better understanding of the state of knowledge of the Sun than the people who actually study it. They know far better than you what we do and do not know.