Holocene Temperature Trend

A paper by Jeremiah Marsicek et al published in Nature compares palaeoclimate data with a climate model.

[W]e show that temperatures reconstructed from sub-fossil pollen from 642 sites across North America and Europe closely match simulations, and that long-term warming, not cooling, defined the Holocene until around 2,000 years ago.

Overall, our reconstructions indicate that the on-going warming today would have started from a baseline approximately 0.5°C higher than observed had millennial-to-centennial-scale variations not produced cooling over the past two millennia that deviated from Holocene trends. The reconstructions support the ability of models such as CCSM3 to capture large-scale climate responses to external forcing and important internal dynamics.

The most glaring part of the picture is the rapid warming of the past 50 years.