Sometimes you have to, but engineering ethics dictates that you put a break in the ordinate if you have to show only part of the scale. Four or five °F is only about 1% of the entire temperature scale. Not that this isn't significant in terms of ice ages versus warm periods, but it gives you a better perspective of the big picture.
To me, (
to me) the noisy "big picture" looks like we're actually heading into one of the regular cold periods (which was speculated fifty years ago IIRC). However, as I have said, look me up in fifty years and let me know how it's turning out.
Ice core data. Note they cop out on the Zero problem a little by graphing the ordinate as Δ K.
(Actually, they effed up by calling it "delta °K" and the Kelvin scale does not make use of "degrees," at least the last I heard, but that's another issue.)
Essentially the same knd of data but with the abscissa reversed:
To the
disinterested observer, the regular long-term periodicity jumps out and smacks you in the intellect, as opposed to the paltry (if accurate) measurements of the past 200 years which supposedly shows the infamous "curved upward like a hockey stick" predictions.
And the acute observer will note with a grin that this graph has a negative slope, tee hee. :D
Terry, 230RN
Image credits in properties.