The Belle is back! Still following Dan around? ;-)
As for global warming, in my opinion the bigger danger for human kind is to run out of hot air. That's, admittedly, the lens through which I read a lot of material when anyone, including scientists, tries to invoke or promote some "doing about something". As if any human planning or "solution" on any large or "global" scale hasn't let to disaster as of yet, if not right away then on the slightly longer term! Causality, black swans and so on.
Anyway, one eye-opening proxy for the past temperature is the most recent GRIP2 ice-core analysis in Greenland. Some of the most recent reconstructions by the most prominent ice-core experts who
suggests now to have higher accuracy than earlier work. The paper shows
this interesting graphic.
Greenland is important as proxy as it generally seems to correlate with Northern Hemisphere temperature overall, unlike many other proxies of the past . It also captures the strange warming between 1919-1932, culminating in the 1930's having the most heat records in the US ever recorded.
This ties in with a project to collect more data on the mediaeval warming period as can be seen here
MWP Online Map. Meaning more and more research is showing sudden "extreme" warming around the globe is
also something from the past, leaving us with the question how much
exactly is being added by current CO2 output of industry and transportation.