Leave it to Archie to pose a question that brings up my curiosity. so have a look ...
Gee, a lot of articles on what ended the ice age.. conservatives will like this one, it says , not ended yet.. Aimed at high schoolers,, it is short.. follow the link...
https://www.amnh.org/explore/ology/earth/ask-a-scientist-about-our-environment/how-did-the-ice-age-endTo find out more about Earth's climate in the past, scientists study ice cores. These samples tell us that during the current ice age, climate on Earth has flip-flopped between glacial and interglacial periods at least 17 times!
Ice core
Ice cores are cylinders of ice drilled through the thick sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.
So it is very likely that Earth will turn cold again, possibly within the next several thousand years. But, we have to keep in mind that human activities today are impacting climate on a global scale. So when we predict future climate changes, including the next glacial period, we need to consider the changes that humans are causing.
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This one is longer and explains more... the bottom line to me,,,, seems they do not know for sure.. lots of ideas to choose from..
https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-the-rise-and-fall-of-co2-levels-influenced-the-ice-agesThe Earth’s climate has been quite stable over the past 11,000 years, playing an important role in the development of human civilisation.
Prior to that, the Earth experienced an ice age lasting for tens of thousands of years. The past million years of the Earth’s history has been characterised by a series of ice ages broken up by relatively short periods of warmer temperatures.
These ice ages are triggered and ended by slow changes in the Earth’s orbit. But changing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 also plays a key role in driving both cooling during the onset of ice ages and warming at their end.
The global average temperature was around 4C cooler during the last ice age than it is today. There is a real risk that, if emissions continue to rise, the world warms more this century than it did between the middle of the last ice age 20,000 years ago and today.
In this explainer, Carbon Brief explores how the last ice age provides strong evidence of the role CO2 plays as a “control knob” for the Earth’s climate. It also acts as a cautionary tale of how the climate can experience large changes from relatively small outside “forcings”.