There’ve been 20 such cycles in the last couple of million years AND we are about 5,000 years overdue for the next one to start.
Don’t ever bother opening your eyes.
Bingo.
You appear to be up on this, but for those who want more information (ammunition?) right from the climate researchers, in fact, the Earth has on average been gradually cooling (though technically not in an “Ice Age”) for over 40 million years. The gradual overall cooling and the increasing amplitude of the shorter term oscillations seems to roughly coincide with the rise of the Himalayas and the Rockies, so they may be contributing factors.
At any rate, one just has to love the dilemna for the global warmers. IF one accepts that Man has a significant effect, reduce CO2, and maybe drop FAST into the cycle. At at this point, that might be pretty cold...
The approximate 12,000 year duration for an inter-glacial period is a general average, if that. Some inter-glacial periods have lasted far longer.Although no one can say with any certainty, one of the likely patterns of Earth’s orbital mechanics occuring at preseent may match one of those eealrier long duration patterns for an inter-glacial period. If so, the current inter-glacial period could endure for another 50,000 years. Even so, there are warm and cool phases in the inter-glacial periods and the glacial periods. The Milankovitch cycles are variations of Earth’s orbital mechanics with cyclic periods measured in tens of thousands of years and hundreds of thousands of years. The Milankovitch cycles are cyclic variatsuperimposed on the similarly short teerm glacial periods and inter-glacial periods of the ice age and non-ice age climates last tens of millions to hundreds of millions of years. Ice ages have been rare and abnormal in the Earth’s past experience. There have only been about five or six ice agees in the Earth’s 4.6 billion year or 4,500 million year history. We currently are living in an inter-glacial period for about the last 11,000 yearrs in an ongoing ice age that started about 20 million years ago. Only in the last 6 million years has there been an unusual number of more severe glacial periods which have sometimes caused the Arctic Sea to rremain covered by ice sheeets the year around. In most of the past ice ages in the last 550 million years, the Arcic Circle remained free of an ice cap and significant glacial uce sheets.
Milankovitch cycles have always occurred whether or not there were any ice aes or glacial ice sheets around to be influenced by the variations in the Earth’s orbital mechanics.