George Kulka, a respected climatologist from the Czech Academy of Sciences, warned on TV in the US that “the ice age is due now any time”.

I think this is emblematic how the story went. Kulka was a paleoclimatologist - he studied the cycles of ice ages, and was pointing out that we're overdue for an ice age. We might read something like "due now any time" and think "oh god let's stock the ice age shelter," but the scale of ice age cycles is tens of thousands of years - "any time" to a paleoclimatologist means "next thousand years maybe."

Any news stories forecasting an ice age within the lifetime of anyone alive were about as scientifically sound as the movie The Core was about the cycle of Earths' magnetic field.