Now this is a common enough literary trope -- reversal of expectations -- but the matter was already becoming politicized and so reaction to the book was largely political, even though a closer inspection of the premise reveals that it accepts the fact that carbon dioxide does tend to warm the earth. It simply supposes that Other Stuff is going on at the same time; viz., another ice age is starting and global warming is staving it off. Remember, this was just at the tail end of the Global Cooling hoo-hah, a phase of history now falling into George Orwell's "memory hole."
