Reporting from Wisconsin:

10,000-20,000 years ago, there was a glacier where I'm sitting. I think any reasonable human would be able to ascertain, that, why, yes it is warmer than it was 10,000 years ago.

By the way, isn't Russia having extremely cold weather?

From the site www.physical geography.net :

The warming resumed by 8500 BC. By 5000 to 3000 BC average global temperatures reached their maximum level during the Holocene and were 1 to 2° Celsius warmer than they are today. Climatologists call this period the Climatic Optimum. During the climatic optimum many of the Earth's great ancient civilizations began and flourished. In Africa, the Nile River had three times its present volume, indicating a much larger tropical region.

If you go back further still (past 10k years) there are more extreme fluctuations in climate than anything we have experienced in our short history.

One of the really nifty things about global warming is that even when temperatures plunge to ridiculously low levels (see Europe), it's further proof that our world is warming up.

Win-Win!

There's too much federal money going into climate research for there to be any honesty left in the field.

One thousand years ago the Vikings were farming in Greenland, and the winters there were gentle. They also had settlements in Newfoundland, where winters were often snow-free. At that time there were vineyards in Britain, as there were in Roman times.

Google "Roman Warm Period," "Dark Ages Cold Period," "Medieval Warm Period," "Little Ice Age," and "Industrial Age Warm Period" for descriptions of a cyclical (1000-1400-yr cycle) in recent climatic history.

Here's a good page: http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/2005-06-09/what.htm

Not just Russia, quite a bit of Eastern Europe.

Clayton Cramer has links to a number of record cold events in the last week or two.

The actual temperature record for most of the earth's surface covers a remarkably short period of time. I think the longest continuous series of temperature records is for a site in England that extends back to about 1400.

Data series such as tree rings are used to construct temperatures over larger areas and time scales. These data indicate that there was a very warm period at least in in Europe, North America, and China about 1000 years ago where temperatures were as high or higher than they are at present.

The existence of a recent worldwide period of warmer temperatures prior to the industrial age would gut the anthropogenic global warming argument. The response to the "Medieval Warm Period" data has been successively that: 1. It did not exist; 2. It was only a local phenomenon, i. e. North America and Europe; 3. It existed, but it was only as warm as the world in the first half of the 20th century.

Two good web sites for anthropogenic glogal warming skepticism are "Junk Scinece" and "The CO2 Project".

I believe the question of how to determine the global temperature today is still in question, no less 10,000 years ago.

The basic motivation for this IMHO is to hobble capitalism in the country applying it most successfully. Additionally it's one hell of a great career niche.

In any case I'm enjoying this warmer winter, so far, and hope it continues. But as they say in NH, we'll pay for it.

The Daily Duck discusses this very subject here.

Also, this series discusses global warming in considerable detail. The articles can be fairly technical, but anyone I have seen posting here has enough intellectual horsepower to take them on board.

It is important to keep in mind that the luddites conflate too different issues, global warming and anthropogenic global warming (i.e., human induced global warming). The evidence for the former, such as this article, is much stronger than the evidence for the latter. As the other commentors have noted, global warming is quite plausible. The same evidence, however, indicates that if GW is occuring, it's unlikely to be AGW. If indeed we have GW but not AGW, then the solution set is much different. That's why the luddites spend so much effort conflating the two.

If you believe there's global warming, then have I got a deal on a Greenland vinyard for you!

In years past, there was talk of how introducing Imported Canadian Wolves into Yellowstone would "restore the ecosystem". Restore it to when? As with Wisconsin, only about 15,000 years ago it was covered with ice, yet you never heard about people wanting to restore that ecosystem.

"yet you never heard about people wanting to resore that ecosystem"

I dunno, a few of us FIBs down here might feel otherwise, especially after experiences with Wisconsin cops.

A nice chart of the past 10,000 years is available here:

http://www.ace.mmu.ac.uk/Resources/gcc/5-3-2-2.html

At any rate, the Hansen statement appears to be falsified.

AOG is correct about man-made effects not causing or predominating; the above-referenced site shows just how variable things were (and comparatively how extraordinarily stable things are today)back when. Surely 100,000 years ago man was not the cause of the fluctuations...

Rove has and uses a time machine don't ya know.