This statement made me wonder about just how this interglacial compares with the past few interglacials. To check it out, I downloaded the Vostok ice core temperature data, based on duterium, from this NOAA
website and plotted it up. The resulting 420,000 year temperature
graph shows the current interglacial and 4 previous ones. The data show that 91% of the time over the past 420,000 years the temperature was colder than it is now. Glacials periods last considerably longer than interglacials.
To compare interglacials, I plotted up the current and 3 previous interglacial temperatures vs time on the same graph, by shifting the time scale of the previous interglacials by 120,000, 228,000 and 315,000 years. This is shown
here. These data indicate that the warmup time for the previous 3 interglacials was similar to the current one, and they reached temperatures 2 to 3 degrees C higher than the current temperature. One of the interglacials (228,000 ybp) had a very short duration at elevated temperature, but the other two peaked a bit higher than the current one, and slowly drifted through the present temperature before descending again into a glacial period.