Maybe they don't have ice ages on the planet Bill Gates comes from

On February 15 the Wall Street Journal publicized Bill Gates' latest book, "How to Avoid Climate Disaster." The book "outlines the various activities that add greenhouse gases to the earth’s atmosphere and then offers a step-by step analysis of the innovations that could offer a remedy." As an incentive to WSJ readers to pay attention, the article explains there's an awful lot of money to be made from Climate Change. There is indeed, notwithstanding Solyndra's flameout, which cost American taxpayers an awful lot of money.

If Bill's instructions are a success at vastly reducing manmade greenhouse gases (note that if it's something bad, it's still called manmade rather than humanmade), I look forward to his step-by-step analysis on avoiding an ice age.

See, that was the whole point of manmade greenhouse gases, as far as Svante Arrhenius was concerned -- Arrhenius being the first scientist to "use principles of physical chemistry to estimate the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide are responsible for the Earth's increasing surface temperature" according to Wikipedia. But he undertook his study in a quest to understand how ice ages happened.

After getting his  point across in German and at least one other language, in 1908 he went to the English-speaking public. In his book, "Worlds in the Making" he wrote:

"We often hear lamentations that the coal stored up in the earth is wasted by the present generation without any thought of the future, and we are terrified by the awful destruction of life and property which has followed the volcanic eruptions of our days. We may find a kind of consolation in the consideration that here, as in every other case, there is good mixed with the evil. By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind." (p. 63)

Subsequent generations of scientists pointed out his laughable underestimation of how much carbon emissions would be produced by factories but the point is that Arrhenius seemed to think manmade global warming could save the human race from being wiped out by a catastrophic ice age. 

Was he right? Maybe, in theory. From a riveting explainer about the discovery of global warming (which mentions Arrhenius' work):

Past Climate Cycles: Ice Age Speculations:

[...] 

The calculations were backed up in 2004 by data from a heroic new drilling effort in Antarctica that brought up ice spanning the past eight glacial cycles. Among these was an unusually long previous cycle where the orbital elements had been similar to those in our own cycle. On the other hand, in 2012 a team using a different ancient cycle as an analogy to the present claimed that the world should indeed be descending into an ice age within the next few thousand years.(53*)

The scientists who published these calculations always added a caveat. In the Antarctic record, atmospheric CO2 levels over the past 750,000 years had cycled between about 180 and 280 parts per million. The level by 2012 had climbed almost to 400 and kept climbing. (The other main greenhouse gas, methane, was soaring even farther above any level seen in the long ice record.) Greenhouse warming and other human influences seemed strong enough to overwhelm any natural trend.

One scientist, paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman, even argued that the rise of human agriculture had already produced enough greenhouse gases to counteract the gradual cooling that should have come during the past several thousand years; every previous cycle had begun a steady cooling soon after its peak, rather than leveling off as ours had done.(53a) As emissions climbed exponentially, we might not only cancel the next ice age but launch our planet into an altogether new climate regime.

[...]

To cut a story I think the scientific consensus at this time is that whatever threat the human race would face from a catastrophic ice age is neither here nor there, if we're wiped out first by unprecedented global warming.

But is it unprecedented? Here we run into the reality that it's not possible to put the universe and its history on a laboratory bench for examination. Which calls to my mind an old joke told to me by a CIA  analyst. I can't remember the exact details but the gist is this:

After World War Three broke out, the U.S. President called the CIA director into the Oval Office. He threw a 2,674 page report at him titled, "How to Avert World War Three" and fumed, 'We did everything this damn report recommended! Now you tell me what we missed!" 

The director called for the lead analyst on the report and snapped, 'Tell the President what they missed.'

The analyst thumbed through the report then said, 'They missed the third footnote on page 822.'

Somehow I doubt Bill Gates would find the joke funny. 

********