The last deglaciation, which occurred from 18,000 to 11,000 years ago, is the most recent large natural climatic variation of global extent. With accurately dated paleoclimate records, we can investigate the timings of related variables in the climate system during this major transition. Here, we use an accurate relative chronology to compare regional temperature proxy data and global atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> as recorded in Antarctic ice cores. We build a stack of temperature variations by averaging the records from five ice cores distributed across Antarctica, and develop a volcanic synchronization to compare it with the high-resolution, robustly dated WAIS Divide CO<sub>2</sub> record. We assess the CO<sub>2</sub>/Antarctic temperature phase relationship using a stochastic method to accurately identify the probable timings of abrupt changes in their trends. During the large, millenial-scale changes at the onset of the last deglaciation at 18 ka and the onset of the Holocene at 11.5 ka, Antarctic temperature most likely led CO<sub>2</sub> by several centuries. A marked event in both series around 16 ka began with a rapid rise in CO<sub>2</sub>, which stabilized synchronously with temperature. CO<sub>2</sub> and Antarctic temperature peaked nearly synchronously at 14.4 ka, the onset of the Antarctic Cold Reversal (ACR) period. And CO<sub>2</sub> likely led Antarctic temperature by around 250 years at the end of the ACR. The five major changes identified for both series are coherent, and synchrony is within the 2 σ uncertainty range for all of the changes except the Holocene onset. But the often-multimodal timings, centennial-scale substructures, and likely-variable phasings we identify testify to the complex nature of the two series, and of the mechanisms driving the carbon cycle and Antarctic temperature during the deglaciation.