That is a bad example of a bad example. It is clearly labeled and shows what it wants to show: The previously hottest years and the large jump of that record in 2012. How would you have done it better? What is it misinterpreting?
The worst thing is that the years are not in order, though one would assume that they were. It makes it look like the years are getting hotter and hotter as time moves from left to right.
Which is what you did. There's no "large jump" in 2012. 2012 was one degree warmer than 1934, which in turn was a quarter degree warmer than 1999.
Besides, using the most extreme six points in the last century to paint a trend is awfully stupid anyway. With all of the data that was omitted, the temperature could have averaged 53.5 degrees from 1921 to 2006, then dropped to 45 degrees from 2007 to 2011 - indicating that we were suddenly falling into a new ice age punctuated by sparse years of extreme heat - and this graph(esque monstrosity) would look exactly the same.
This is a perfect example of information presentation that makes the people exposed to it stupider than they were before they saw it, because now they think that they know something.
edit: to be clearer - all this graphic is saying is that 2012 was the hottest year in the last 100 years.
Here's a mind-experiment; find a record value of anything that occurs in sequence. Take the previous 99 values of that sequence, and eliminate all but the top five values. Arrange those values from lowest to highest from left to right, ending with the record value.
Number of Participants in the Sleepy
Hollow Hog-Calling Competition During
Record Years of Participation in the
Sleepy Hollow Hog-Calling Competition
56 **
55 **
54 ** **
53 ** ** ** **
52 ** ** ** ** **
51 ** ** ** ** ** **
1991 1915 1914 2006 1931 2012
We learn that there has never been such an interest in the hog-calling competition before and that in 2012 it was significantly higher than ever before.
The axis should start at 0 degrees, not 53. The 3 dimensionality distorts it as the orange bars slightly angle to the left and makes 2012 look much bigger in relation to the other bars. If you actually plot all the hottest years on a 2d bar chart starting from 0, it gives a much clearer picture of climate change while still revealing that 2012 was indeed the hottest year on record..
If its showing relative magnitude of change, 53 degrees is better than 0. Whether how much farther this is from other "hot" years than they are from each other is a key point is at least debatable.
For any purpose for which a zero is needed (which doesn't include showing magnitude of change), for temperature 0 degrees F (which presumably this is -- a real problem with this is that it just specifies degrees, which is ambiguous) is just as arbitrary and inappropriate as 53 degrees F; if you are doing a visualization for which it is important to show a meaningful zero, you'd actually want absolute zero (0K). But for most things related to climate change, there's no reason for "zero" as the baseline.
There's certainly purposes for which a meaningful baseline other than 0K or 53F would be appropriate -- what that baseline would be depends on the purpose.
I vehemently disagree that 0 should be the baseline. That would make absolutely no sense for this plot. I would use something like the average or median of the relevant temperatures as baseline. Using 0 as baseline gives you huge columns and does not highlight the big step at all. I would rather have relative value changes to the lowest temperature I chose to display, so in this case: 0 0.12 0.33 0.50 0.51 1.49
3D columns are bad of course, but that is neglible.
Also (this may be my personal opinion), but I think people are used to seeing the x-axis encode time. That visualization makes it look like its slowly getting hotter year after year if you don't pay attention to the labels.
