Below is a rough comparison of contemporary Global Warming and estimates of past temperature change. This is a visualization in the vein of this plot on Wikipedia. Uncertainties increase substantially as estimates go back further in time. Time resolution also decreases further back in time so much of the high-frequency climate variability seen more recently would presumably also exist in the more distant past but is not detectable. Sources of data are below.
Hansen, J., R. Ruedy, M. Sato, and K. Lo (2010) Global surface temperature change, Rev. Geophys., 48, RG4004, doi:10.1029/2010RG000345.
Mann, M. E, Z. Zhang, M. K. Hughes, R. S. Bradley, S. K. Miller, S. Rutherford, Fenbiao Ni (2008) Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia, PNAS, 105 (36) 13252-13257; doi: 10.1073/pnas.0805721105.
Marcott, S. A., J. D. Shakun, P. U. Clark, A. C. Mix (2013) A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years, Science, 339, 6124, 1198-1201
doi:10.1126/science.1228026.
Lisiecki, L. E., and M. E. Raymo (2005), A Pliocene‐Pleistocene stack of 57 globally distributed benthic δ18O records, Paleoceanography, 20, PA1003, doi:10.1029/2004PA001071.
Shakun, J. D., P. U. Clark, F. He, S. A. Marcott, A. C. Mix, Z. Liu, B. Otto-Bliesner, A. Schmittner & E. Bard (2012) Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation, Nature 484, 49–54, doi:10.1038/nature10915.
Winkelmann, R., A. Levermann A. Ridgwell, K. Caldeira (2015) Combustion of available fossil fuel resources sufficient to eliminate the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Science Advances, 2015: 1, 8, e1500589 doi:10.1126/sciadv.1500589.
Zachos, J., M. Pagani, L. Sloan, E. Thomas, and K. Billups, 2001: Trends, rhythms, and aberrations in global climate 65 Ma to present. Science, 292, 686-693. doi:10.1126/science.1059412
Patrick T. Brown, PhD 
Patrick,
Thanks for sharing this! I’ll have to add this animation to my series that quantifies global warming: https://datablends.us/climate-change-quantified/
Thanks,
Ken
My comment on the Marcott et al paper that you cite can be seen here on the old version of the Science website.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130623011346/http://www.comments.sciencemag.org/content/10.1126/science.1228026
There was no response from any of the authors or any other climate scientists.
Hi Paul, Thanks for this. I am aware of the controversy surrounding the “uptick” in the Marcott et al. reconstruction. In the graphic I produced, it defaults to using the instrumental data since 1880. So it essentially throws out Marcott et al.’s uptick and only uses the portion of the reconstruction that looks the same as in the PhD thesis.
Splicing instrumental data onto proxies is just as bad as what Marcott et al did.
Pingback: Today in disaster resilience (24 August 2018) – Disaster Resilience News
Pingback: Today in climate change (24 August 2018) – Climate Change Update
Pingback: Daily, Seasonal, Annual and Decadal Temperature Variability on a Single Graph | Patrick T. Brown, PhD
Different methods are used to measure or estimate global average temperatures in the past and in the present. Apart from the fact that it is difficult to move from one method to the next without breaks to obtain apparently continuous plots for longer periods, the methods have different time resolutions. As a general rule, the further back in time one moves, the lower the temporal resolution offered by the available data. Therefore, it cannot be claimed that the increase in global temperature we see today never occurred in the past.