Synopsis: The unprecedented, long-term climate change and global warming actually took place over 40 years ago.
One of the reasons that the UK's HadCRUT global temperature series is considered the 'gold-standard' is its reaching back to year 1850 - a year that is considered near the end of the Little Ice Age (LIA).
This dataset's superior length allows analysis of long-term climate change since the LIA, including the widely accepted 60-year cycle of global temperatures.
The adjacent chart plots 60-year global temperature changes and cumulative atmospheric CO2 level changes since 1850, using the annual HadCRUT4 dataset.
From this chart, the following can be discerned:
===>Long-term climate change (60-years), as evidenced by temperature change, has been increasing as the globe has rebounded from the depths of the Little Ice Age
===>Long-term warming started well in advance of huge modern consumer/industrial CO2 emissions of post-WWII.
===>Unprecedented warming ended with the 60-year peak around 1969 and subsequent long-term warming has returned to very modest levels.
===>Claimed "accelerating" temperature warming does not exist in the more recent long-term record - however, there are 60-year periods of cooling and warming spurts that are the likely result of natural cycles.
===>Both the chart's fitted trend and 10-year average curve (cyan and dark blue, respectively), reveal a temperature change direction that is vastly different (i.e. opposite) of the trend exhibited by the growing cumulative CO2 ppm levels.
===>The hypothesized AGW positive feedback, which supposedly leads to accelerating temperature increases and long-term, "tipping point" climate change, is without any empirical evidence merit
===>Prior to 1970, HadCRUT4 documents four exceptional 60-year warming peaks that are equal or larger than either the modern era's 1998 and 2010 peak.
===>The chart depicts long-term climate change (per changes in temperatures) that is constant, never ending - at times dramatic, and other periods, exhibiting more subtle changes
In summary, the immense growth of cumulative CO2 levels over the last 40+ years has had minimal long-term impact on global temperature change. Recent temperature changes are more likely the result of a combination of the remaining natural warming rebound from the LIA end and natural cycles, which produced those large 60-year temperature increases prior to 1970.
Additional regional and global temperature charts.
Note: Reminder, trends are not predictions. Download datasets used to calculate 60-year changes, trends and etc. using Excel. Don't know how to chart in Excel? It's easy. Go here to learn how.