Nature of Little Ice Ages
On the off chance the subject should ever come up...
Real ice ages such as the Pleistocene had cosmic causes. For anything like that to recur would require something which is essentially impossible within any sort of an imaginable timeframe starting from now. A second or third LITTLE ICE AGE, which is what we seem to be entering into now, is just a fluctuation in the way that a star operates and that gets into a funny situation inasmuch as what they teach about stars and how they operate in our schools is completely wrong. If a star actually were a thermonuclear engine as they teach, it would not fluctuate in its output and there would be no such thing as a Little Ice Age. Stars are basically light bulbs, focal points of cosmic discharge involving Birkeland currents in space. If the Birkeland current which powers our system fluctuates or if our sun passes the regions of space with greater or lesser electrical potential difference from itself, then the output of the sun fluctuates and we experience hotter or colder time periods.
Particularly with the number of people now living on our planet and given the likelihood of our entering a new Little Ice Age, we need to be on top of every possible energy resource that we have. The very last thing that we need is any sort of a "war on coal" motivated by Malthusians precepts or by any sort of a desire to please "Gaia(TM)".