Nobody has stated that the ice age has ended. Twila Moon, a climate scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center, said, “We are still within an ice age. We do have large ice sheets on Earth, but we are in an interglacial, as we have less ice and are losing it. Hothouse Earth is the phrase commonly used to describe periods when there is no ice on Earth and the Arctic might be green and warm,” she said.
She added, “Because of human-caused climate change, we run the risk of quickly moving the Earth into a hothouse state. This would not be good for humans or the other living things we depend on, especially since we are making this change happen quickly right now.”
Moon noted that before humans started changing the climate so rapidly, other geologic and planetary processes created the changes.
“For example, the Earth changes its orientation and orbit—these ’slow’ (in human metrics) changes shift the amount of sun the Earth receives and that can allow ice sheets to grow or to diminish,” she said.
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— Bob Berwyn