Global warming may have saved us from another catastrophe: a new ice age.

The surprising conclusion comes from a study published in the journal Nature recently, which claims that we may have been on the verge of entering such an ice age, if it hadn’t been for humans setting fires, chopping down massive amounts of trees, and conducting agriculture, according to a Washington Post report.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who is one of the three authors of the paper and the founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said that “humanity narrowly escaped a glacial inception in the middle of the Holocene, which was almost suppressing the formation of civilization.”

The massive amount of human greenhouse gases that were sent into the atmosphere by our activities probably postponed this ice age by a whopping 100,000 years.

Basically, there are two factors at play when it comes to ice ages. The first is the Milankovitch cycle, which refers to how the planet orbits the sun over a long period of time. The orbit of the Earth gets more and less elliptical, and the poles wobble while spinning, which can affect how much sunlight certain parts of the Earth get. This factor is totally outside of our control.

But the second factor, how much carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere, is in our control, and we have been pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through massive deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels. This traps heat and resulting in an overall warming effect that we’re seeing now.

So while the scientific world warns us of oncoming rising sea levels, fierce storms, droughts, and a host of other problems due to climate change and global warming — at least we’re not having an ice age, and we can thank ourselves for that.