When placing city buildings manually, when you choose "use timeline year", only buildings of the appropriate time period you are currently in are shown in the list. The button "ignore climates" does not have similar functionality - obviously, the game can't read your mind and know where you want to build.
Even so, every other button on that window actually changes which buildings are on the list. I think it would be appropriate to change "ignore climate" to be something like "Show only one climate" with a dropdown menu to choose which climate to show.