Well, unfortunately the lead line from the Wikipedia article is a bit misleading, as it makes it sound like it was merely a bunch of sensationalist news stories. That is not true. There were genuine concerns by climate scientists about that (apparently they were misled in part becauase of low time resolution of paleoceanography studies). Check out the references and the rest of the article.

It is probably true that there was no consensus about it back then though. (I do not know enough about it to be completely sure.)