I read the article that nemo posted. Whoever writes that stuff are masters at making half assed statements sound official and 100% genuine. The last Ice age, the one they called the last mini Ice Age, started to recede about 15,000 years ago but started coming back again. Then it started to retreat again about 12,000 years ago and was gone by 9,000 years ago. There have been several "Mini Ice Ages" and they were not of the magnitude of the last Ice age. There was a so called mini ice age going on during the American Revolutionary War and another that caused the Irish Potato Famine in Europe. The mini ice ages are actually pretty short in duration. The one's I know of lasted about 5 years. With all that said, when I was studying Geology as a hobby, I had a bunch of friends who where full blown real Geologists and they all told me waaaaay back in the late 1960's that we should expect another Ice Age in the future. They weren't talking about those little pip squeak mini ice ages either. When all the Global Warming morons started running off at the mouth because a Masters student in Ohio wrote his thesis about the possibility of there being a problem with the Ozone Holes surfaced, they went all Henny Penny and started the Global Warming crap. Little did they know, we need all the Carbon Dioxide we can get to hold off the coming Ice Age.
Sorry for the rant, but every time I hear mention of this sort of thing, it lights my fuse.