[jdlegg]

Temperatures have not been rising for 150 years or more. You need to check your facts.

Direct instrumental measurements only go back ~150 years, but another direct mechanism exists: borehole measurements [1]. This gives us a very good measurement of temperature over ~500 years. These show that at no time have temperature averages been as high as they are now.

We can go back even further, to the tune of 1000 years, through proxy data obtained via things like tree rings, coral growth, stalagmite layers, etc. This covers the so-called "Medieval Warm Period" and these data show the last century to be warmer than any other in the data set.

Not enough? Antarctic ice core analysis provides a record of the glacial-interglacial cycle over 100s of thousands of years. These data show that current average temperatures are higher than they've been over the last 100,000+ years. This is documented in Figure 2.22 of the IPCC Third Assessment Report [2].

[1] http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/borehole/index.html [2] http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc%5Ftar/?src=/clim...