I think that I read somewhere that it was higher before the first ice age...more like the tropics. But maybe my memory is faulty, although I don't hear any dinosaurs contradicting me, so........

1) "Perhaps we all need to be reminded that the current average temperature of the Earth is approximately 50°F. When the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the average is estimated to be 60-70°F. There was no ice at the poles. The Arctic never froze. If we are warming up, perhaps we should think of it as warming up to our pre-ice age temperature norm." Source: http://humanitysedge.homeip.net/articles/globalwarming.doc 2) "Drastic climate change wasn't always our fault. In fact, wild swings in the average temperature of the Earth were going on in the time of the dinosaurs. A study based on an analysis of ocean sediment that will appear in the October issue of Geology shows that the climate of ancient Earth was surprisingly fickle. During the Cretaceous period, ocean surface temperatures varied wildly, by as much as 6° C. "We get a switch, from warming then cooling, then warming then cooling," said Simon Brassell, a paleoclimatologist at Indiana University, Bloomington and lead author of the study. "It's as if the Earth's climate responds not necessarily gradually, but more like a changing gear in a car. And that's something that many climatologists are concerned about—whether there is some threshold that will lead to us to a very different climate than we're experiencing now." The fluctuations in climate would have been the result of natural changes in concentrations of certain greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, which was present in the Creataceous atmosphere in high concentrations, Brassell said. Though the new study shows that drastic climate change can occur naturally, Brassel emphasized that in the modern era, humans have a major influence on climate. "The action of humans now is one more perturbation to the system of climate change, but probably one that is much more significant than any other perturbation that can occur naturally," Source and further information: http://seedmagazine.com/news/2006/09/dinosaurs_experienced_wild_shi.php

-O-uknow has suggested that we are recovering from the last ice age. However, it is really too early to say that we are recovering from the conditions that led to the ice age. The arrangement of the continents and the ocean currents are still the same as they were when the ice age began. The glacial-interglacial cycle is around 100,000 years. The last glacial period ended a mere 12,000 years ago. Additionally, the average length of past ice ages for the Earth is 165 million years. Ours has lasted only 40 million years. So, there is no guaranty that we are out of the present ice age. Finally, consider that fact that dropping into another ice age would be much worse for us than warmer temperatures would be. The warmer conditions during the time of the dinosaurs provided sufficient food to support those gigantic animals over much of earth's surface. Another ice age would mean much of the land that we now cultivate would be covered in ice. When looked at from this perspective, I'll take a little bit of global warming.