We're still learning about climate change...

A nice op-ed in today's Ottawa Citizen by Tad Murty, a professor at the University of Ottawa, on how we are still learning about climate change.

To rad newspapers or listen to TV or radio you would think it was all very straightforward - CO2 levels have risen and so has temperature. But this simple story is clearl false.

While it is true that CO2 has risen steadily for the last 100 years or so, temperature has not. In fact, as best we can determine, global temperatures fell during the middle half of the last centure, while CO2 climbed steadily. Even worse, some parts of the Earth have cooled over the last century. So the simple theory - CO2 up, temperature up -- is unsubstantiated.

And how about the polar ice caps?

The reality, determined by extensive measurements, suggests that both ice caps are growing in volume, not skrinking. In a paper titled "Snowfall-driven growth in East Antartica ice sheet mitigates recent sea-level rise," published in May 2005 in the prestigious journal Science, researchers Davis et al used satellite measurements to show that parts of the East Antarctic ice sheet increased in mass by about 45 billion tons per year from 1992 to 2003. Also not appreciated by the general public is the fact that the South Pole itself is colder now that at any time since record keeping began in the International Gephysical Year, 1957.