Originally Posted by Steerpike

We're in an interglacial period right now. We've come out of a so-called little ice-age, and we're due to head into one (in terms of geological time, not human time).

The problem is, we don't have enough data to really know what is going on with the climate. In the 1970s climatologists thought we might be getting ready to undergo changes leading up to another ice age. They may still be right. A shift like that is going to cause some chaos in the climate. It could be that the warming we've experienced is part of that. We simply don't know at this point.