In message , Timothy Murphy
writes
Stewart Robert Hinsley wrote:

Actually, that is a myth. The (then weak) consensus in the scientific
press, rather than the popular media, was for warming.

It depends what time-scale you are talking about.
I think the Milankovitch cycle theory,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles#100.2C000-year_problem,
is generally accepted,
and according to that we are near the end of an inter-glacial period
(in a 100,000 year cycle).

The Milankovitch cycles are the summation of several independent cycles,
and while the length of a typical interglacial is 10,000 years, the
length of individual interglacials varies according to how the phases of
the cycles interact. The current interglacial is predicted, even sans
anthopogenic effects, to be an extended one. I'm told that this was
known to scientists by the 1970's, even though it hadn't filtered
through to the popular media.

I haven't seen any such prediction; can you give a citation for it?

For a more recent instance of that prediction

"In this paper, we have shown the extended climate record back to
740 kyr, and that the pattern of climate before MIS 11 was different
to that which has followed for the past four glacial cycles. Although
the results from MIS 11 indicate that without human intervention a
climate similar to the present one would extend well into the future,
the predicted increases in greenhouse-gas concentrations make this
unlikely" (EPICA community members, Eight glacial cycles from an
Antarctic ice core, Nature 429: 623-628 (2004)) - URL:
http://www.up.ethz.ch/people/flueckiger/publications/epica04nat.pdf

There are other papers in the post-2000 time period.

When I was told that a prediction of an extended duration of the current
interglacial as current in the 1970s I wasn't give any citations. The
nearest I find on a cursory search is a 1972 paper saying (fide the
abstract) that a ten-thousand year estimate is unreliable - as the paper
is paywalled I can't tell whether it gives an alternative estimate.

As it happens, the interglacial period has already extended
longer than the average over the past 800,000 years;
as I understand it, the average is about 10,000 years
while it has already lasted about 12,000 years.

I don't think the 3 Milankovitch cycles are at all precise.
But the fact is, we are in an interglacial period,
and this is likely to end in the next 2000 or so years.

But that is talking about thousands of years;
global warming is talking about the next 100 years.


--
Stewart Robert Hinsley