Erm,
I'm not quite sure how to respond to this without getting into a flame war. But I'll try.

Yes, we're part of a 'bloody huge system' but to think that we have had little to no effect on the planet is naive at best.

Yes, the planet has been warmer than present many times. But the RATE of change has never been this great. And no, measurement didn't start 2,000 years ago, high-resolution proxy records for temperature stem back millions of years, to the Cretaceous and beyond, and even for the most abrupt changes in temperature (e.g. the PETM, the Oi-1, Mi-1) the rate of change is of the order of tens of thousands of years, not hundreds of years like we are seeing.

I'd love it if we were wrong, I really, really would. But the fact of the matter is that emissions of CO2 and methane have steadily increased in the atmosphere of even remote areas over the last 100 years, and these gases are well known to increase the greenhouse effect. Bearing in mind how little of these gases were present in the atmosphere in pre-industrial times (and relative estimates for warming in times when CO2 was as high as predicted future levels, such as the Eocene), it is a fair assumption to make that they are having a significant effect on the planet. Also considering no logical hypothesis has been put forward that (a) explains why anthropogenic CO2 hasn't caused the expected warming and (b) provides a reasonable natural explanation for this sudden increase in warming that doesn't involve some sort of anthropogenic input, it is not a ridiculous step to say that the majority of this warming is attributed to anthropogenic sources.
(The Oscillating Gibbon is eating curried squid, Thu 19 Feb 2009, 23:58, 1 reply)

Yeah, I'll go along with that
But also - it's best to ignore newspaper reports about small drops in temperature detected over the Antarctic, or claiming that global temperatures have actually gone down slightly in a given year: unfortunately these are not signs that we're in the clear. The global mean temperature fluctuates by small amounts and awful lot over the course of a year, and, unfortunately for us, the overall trend is still upwards.
(LongJohnBaldry, Fri 20 Feb 2009, 10:27, closed)

The simple thing is thus
Neither camp of "nothing's happining!" and "we're all going to die the day after TOMORROW!" are correct, both are full of misinformed, opinionated loud-mouths. And I'm stuck here in the middle with you. Shall we make out?
(The Oscillating Gibbon is eating curried squid, Sat 21 Feb 2009, 9:12, closed)