The founder/godfather of climate research was a Brit named Hubert Lamb. His reason for doing his research was to find out what caused the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period and I guess the Minoan one too.
He started his Climate Research Unit in the early ‘70s, and Lamb is why we saw articles about a Coming Ice Age. That’s what he thought was going to happen.
Lamb never did discover what caused the Warm Periods. Neither have any of the following generation of climate scientists. Lamb lived long enough to hear his proteges get all worked up about Global Warming but they never persuaded him to abandon his view that an Ice Age is what is in our future.