A big difference is that has not usually happened at such a high rate of change.
"Geological" warming normally happens over tens of millions of years, not tens of decades (e.g. Cambrian's 55MA was a warming period from current-ish to early ordovician greenhouse).
More rapid changes have been massive extinction events (e.g. O-S).
What is actually quite fast is the change from ice age to interglacial: hundreds to thousands of years in temperatures from Antarctica. It is not quite clear yet how that happens.
yes, but it usually changes over the course of thousands of years, not tens of years. In the past, coral migrated north and south to stay in the optimal temperature. There's not enough time for that at the scale of anthropogenic climate change.
Yeah, exactly. If the change happens as fast as it is happening, you get a mass extinction. If the change happens over thousands of years, biomes have time to migrate.
Using the xkcd timeline as a guide, the temperature change in the last 120 years is about the size of the temperature change between 11,000 and 9,000 BC, which was only mildly disruptive to global ecology.
