RealClimate logo  Data presentation: A trend lesson
Plotting the monthly anomalies of the global mean temperature.
The real trick, however, is to show all the short-term
variations. Hourly and daily values would be an over-kill, but
showing monthly values works. Climate change involves time
scales of many years, and hence if emphasis is given to much
shorter time scales, the trends will drown in noisy variations.
This can be seen if we show annual mean anomalies (as shown
below for exactly the same data), rather than the monthly
anomalies (again, done with the same R-script)         119
Responses to “Data presentation: A trend lesson”      1. 1
It would be even more fun if you reverse the x or y axis. People
don’t look at the numbers on the side anyway :)      2. 2
The real trick is deciding on the end points.        Since
global average surface temperature exhibits a long-term
sinusoidal trend, one can display either a positive or negative
trend with careful start and end point c