Have humans prevented an Ice Age?

Everyone knows that the earth orbits around the sun. Most people also know that our planet is tilted slightly as it orbits (and occillates around it's axis).

What is not well known is that the degree of tilt changes slightly in a 45,000 year cycle, between 22.1° and 24.5°.

source

It seems like a slight movement, but because the earth is so huge, tilting closer to the sun or further away from the sun affects our climate.

The tilt reached it's maximum in about 8,700 BC, and we know from the ice core record and the archaelogical record that this warmed the earth and got us out of the last ice age.

We are currently in a decreasing trend, having moved back to 23.44°, which is about halfway between the maximum and minimum tilt. We won't get to the minimum till the year 11,800 AD.

Decreasing trends are correlated with a cooling climate, increasing trends with a warming climate.

That's why those scientists from the 1970's predicted a new Ice Age. They weren't being idiots - they were basing it on the Axial Tilt cycle, as well as ice core data. What they didn't take account of is how quickly the human population would rise.

The earth had about 2 billion people in the 70's. We're now close to 7 billion. When you more than triple the human population, you also triple greenhouse gases like CO2, which warm the planet.

All humans breathe out CO2. Al the animals we keep for food breather out CO2, and some produce methane as well, which has an even more powerful warming effect than CO2. And then all these humans need to heat their homes, travel to work and produce goods, all of which involves burning fossil fuels which have a warming effect on the planet.

So the long and short of it is this: because of the decreasing Axial Tilt we should be well into a cooling phase with global temperatures cooling. But because the human population has exploded and gone exponential, we are generating so much CO2 that we've not only offset the cooling trend, but we have started to warm further.

Ice Ages are truly horrible - life on earth tends to decrease, including human life, during cooling periods. So it is great that we have avoided it. But we can take comfort in the decreasing tilt - it is offsetting some of what we are doing, and as the tilt keeps decreasing, it should keep on cancelling out what we are doing.

It is sad in a way that we've overshot the human- derived warming. But if we cut the emissions to get it just right, then the combination of our emissions and the decreasing tilt should mean that we are neither too warm nor too cool, we are just right, just like Goldilocks.