Over time, it's been both much colder and a good bit warmer, than it is today. It's been reported that the hottest years of the past century was 2006 until NASA found their math was wrong: it was actually 1934.
The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's classic "Silent Spring" marks the beginning of a sea change: the mass attack on technology and progress as a whole, for environmental reasons.
China and India are adopting personal automobiles. If they follow our path, each country will put itself in a position of its entire economy being vulnerable to interruption of its oil supplies.