I grabbed this graph off of a summary on NOAA's website of an article in Science. Obviously, without the article's context, it's sort of hard to tell what's going on (i.e., it's basically impossible to represent graphically how that black mean is developed, and it's hard to know why the mean starts in 1840). But it's also easy to like the things going on here: the lines are well-identified, the axes are labeled, the colors are nice. The one problem I have is that it doesn't say on the y-axis that it's the temperature of warming, but that would be contextually obvious: I don't think it's very possible that the global temperature of glaciers was -.5 K in 1850.
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Even if it's the temperature of warming, it it totally unclear what zero means. Also, if it's in degrees Kelvin, how frequent are the measurements that we're only seeing fractions of a degree over long periods of time, and are the instruments at 1600 really designed to have that level of sensitivity?
Aside from that, it's not clear why the different lines start at different times. Though I can make some assumptions, does the article even explain them?
There's a delicate balancing act here between having data that goes far enough back to show a trend, and having data that is actually meaningless because we cannot show it to be a universal trend and the differences are smaller than the margin of error of the measuring device. I'm not sure what I would have done if I were designing this graph in terms of this.
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