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Vostok Ice Core Temperatures

Notes:

This is a plot that many are familiar with. It shows the past temperatures, as extracted from the Vostok ice core data. The dotted line is the relative 0, representing the current average temperature and the units of the plot are degrees C of difference.

What's often overlooked, is that data points extracted from ice cores are averages integrated over variable intervals of time and that recent samples are averaged across shorter intervals than more ancient ones. This has important consequences when comparing and contrasting different kinds of data. Comparing changes in averages is only meaningful when they reflect integrations across similar time periods. Longer term averages change more slowly and over a smaller absolute range.

Higher resolution plots can be found in the power point presentation, which is here. The source of the document is in the Open Document Presentation format, which is here.