Chronicle-Herald - Believe it or not... winters are milder

Here's a warm thought for Canadians complaining about the cold: the winters here are not nearly as frigid as they once were. A climate historian from McGill University warns against drawing knee-jerk conclusions about global warming based on one set of numbers - but he calls it an "impressive set of data" and says it supports other climate research.

"I think it can be used as part of a package to support global warming," Don Baker said in an interview. Baker recalled his days as a student in the 1970s when there was plenty of debate about future temperature trends. "At that time it wasn't clear whether the Earth was getting warmer or getting colder," he said. "Since that time all of the evidence points to the Earth getting warmer and I think this is just a bit of that evidence."

Baker, who's with McGill's department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, also notes that there was a warm period in the late 1940s and then temperatures started to drop off until the '70s.