It’s been an abnormally warm winter this year, not just in Minnesota, but across almost all of the United States. Of course, that’s just one year’s weather. However, the long-term climate appears to have warmed as well. Climate data show that there hasn’t been an abnormally cold winter in a very long time.

What’s more, the scientific evidence that human beings are to blame for global warming has continued to grow in size and scope. A new study of the relationship of energy output from the sun to atmospheric absorption of energy shows that the sun cannot be to blame for global warming, as some pollution industry advocates suggest. Even a scientific review funded by the Republican Koch brothers, with the purpose of debunking the anthropogenic hypothesis of global warming, determined that the anthropogenic hypothesis is valid, and that there has not been any global scientific conspiracy to distort scientific data in order to create the false appearance of a global warming crisis.

Scientific research has delivered a thoroughly substantiated, double-triple-quadruple checked, explanation for the reality of global warming: Human activities are to blame for it. The facts behind this analysis apply in Minnesota as much as anywhere else on Earth.

Yet, the current political platform of the Minnesota Republican Party pretends that these facts simply don’t exist. The Minnesota GOP platform currently includes the following statement: “We oppose policies, legislation and mandates that are based on the theory that humans are responsible for global climate change including the Theory of Man-Made Global Warming.” Minnesota Republicans seem to be saying that they don’t care what scientific information is available. They just don’t want to deal with the issue.

Today, the Minnesota Republicans has the opportunity to correct this irresponsible position of willful ignorance and inaction. In local meetings across Minnesota, Republican voters can do much more than just vote for the Republican presidential candidate of their choice. Voters in local caucuses will also have the power to propose changes to the political platform of the Minnesota Republican Party.

In Rochester, in St. Paul, in Duluth, in Grand Forks… somewhere in Minnesota, one decent Republican voter can propose today that the GOP in Minnesota stop its opposition to solutions to the immense and growing problem of climate change. That voter’s caucus can then do the right thing, and approve that platform change for consideration by the statewide Republican Party.

Will that voter step forward today? Will the Minnesota Republican Party step forward and deal with reality?

As if to provide an accent to the urgency of the scientists’ message, the National Snow and Ice Data Center released data showing that in late January, the surface area of the Arctic Ocean entered into a record breaking low for wintertime. The extent of ice now on the Arctic Ocean has been, for many days now, below even the levels from the 2007 to 2008 winter season, the year when remarkably low levels of Arctic ice grabbed international attention.

Over the last several weeks, we’ve been taking note of the highly unusual warm winter weather in places like Council Bluffs, Iowa, northern Michigan and Upstate New York. It’s been easy to imagine, however, that though we are experiencing warm weather down in the lower 48 states, the Arctic remains unchanged, literally frozen.

The new measurements from the National Snow and Ice Data Center show that’s not the case – that even in the land of polar bears and walrus, the winter is just not as cold as it used to be. This year’s ice extent is more than two standard deviations below the historical norm.

The reader wrote to us, “Please notice that NASA data shows that every planet in the solar system is experiencing similar warming over the same period. It seems hard to make a case that terrestrial activity can be responsible for such widespread results. Further study is clearly needed to establish a tentative hypothesis regarding causality.”

Americans who have been paying attention to the science of climate change for more than a few weeks are aware that “further study” has been going on for an entire generation, since before Ronald Reagan advised that “further study” was called for before action could be taken. In the meanwhile, temperatures have kept on rising, and the impact of global warming has become more apparent every year. A mountain of further studies on the human contribution to global warming has accumulated.

Recently, another study supporting the anthropogenic hypothesis of global warming was published in the peer reviewed journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. The study, led by James Hansen, found that, throughout a period of unusually low solar activity, resulting in diminished energy from the sun reaching planet Earth, the Earth’s atmosphere continued to increase the amount of energy that it absorbed. These findings indicate that the Earth is becoming more efficient at absorbing energy from the sun, and refute the notion that the unusual warmth we are now experiencing can be explained by increased solar activity.

It’s also important to note that there is no peer-reviewed scientific study that indicates that, as our reader claimed, all the planets in the Solar System are warming. Assertions of such interplanetary warming trends are completely without foundation in fact. The idea of Solar System warming is, to use a word that Cold Earthers like to use, a hoax.

This introductory line from an Australian Broadcasting Corporation article contains one core piece of information that’s essential to understand the latest Cold Earther effort to convince people that there is no urgent need to address global warming: It was published in the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal.

It was not published in a scientific journal. It was not subjected to review by outside scientists. The only thing that qualified the editorial to be published was an approval by the editors of a corporate-aligned newspaper that is operated by right wing publisher Rupert Murdoch.

The Wall Street Journal opinion piece was designed to gain attention because it was designed by “16 scientists”. Once a person starts to look into the qualifications of these sixteen signers, the article begins to look less impressive.

For example, one of the signers, Harrison Schmitt, is indeed a scientist, but he’s a geologist, not a specialist in a climate-related field. Schmitt has never published any peer reviewed articles in any scientific journal on the subject of climate change.

In spite of his lack of expertise on the subject, Schmitt has been very politically active for years in anti-environmental circles. Schmitt is the former chairman and president of the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy, which advocates against action to protect the environment, and is still active with the Annapolis Center as chairman emeritus. The Annapolis Center has accepted nearly a million dollars in from ExxonMobil.

Schmitt has also been a keynote speaker at the Heartland Institute, a political organization that has taken tens of millions of dollars from the oil industry.

Schmitt promotes the conspiracy theory that environmentalism is really just Communism in disguise, having declared, “I think the whole trend really began with the fall of the Soviet Union. Because the great champion of the opponents of liberty, namely Communism, had to find some other place to go and they basically went into the environmental movement.”

Another signer, Jan Breslow, is a scientist, but he runs a lab that studies hardening of the arteries, not climate. Does Breslow have some data showing that we can understand global climate by examining blood vessels? If so, he has yet to release it.

Michael Kelly specializes in the electronic structure of metals and semiconductors, as well as the development of microwave technology. These fields are not related to climate science.

James McGrath is a chemist who studies polymers to help in the development of adhesives. That sounds like useful work, but it’s not at all related to global warming.

Another one of the “16 scientists”, Burt Rutan is not a scientist at all. He’s an engineer who admits that, on the subject of climate change, “I have a clear bias. My bias is based on fear of government expansion.”

I don’t know these people, and I don’t mean to insult their general intelligence, or professional accomplishments. What I am trying to point out is that they don’t have qualifications in the area of science in which they are being quoted as scientists.

If the sixteen signers wanted to make a significant contribution to our understanding of global warming, or climate more generally, they could have done an analysis of scientific data and submitted a paper for peer review in a scientific journal. The fact that they did not, but chose to write a letter to the editor in a newspaper that is politically aligned with Wall Street’s anti-regulation slant, is telling.

There’s nothing wrong with publications that have a political slant. America is the better for them. The American people, however, should be wise enough not to regard such publications as reasonable primary sources on scientific research.

If you want a better understanding of what’s happening with global warming, look at peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals. Overwhelmingly, these papers indicate that global warming (along with other aspects of climate change) is taking place, is caused primarily by human activities, and is resulting in significant harm to economies around the world.

Arctic Sea Ice Volume for 2010 and 2011:

The fluke, surpassed.

Or not. Citizens for Legitimate Government has the right to dissociate itself from the Reality-Based Community… but I don’t have to read it.

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its latest update of atmospheric CO2 readings this week. These readings have been taken by scientists at the mountaintop Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii since 1958, and the 53-year dataset now includes measurements through November of 2011. If we follow the trend from November to November (to cancel out seasonal variation in CO2 levels), we can see a rise of 24.5% in atmospheric CO2 from 1958 to 2011. This November, CO2 levels in the atmosphere at the Mauna Loa observatory reached a new November high: 390.2 parts per million. Over the last decade, carbon dioxide concentrations have increased by a bit more than 2 parts per million per year. At that rate, the Earth will hit 400 parts per million in November of 2016… just in time for the next presidential election to ignore it.

The study, entitled Religion and Scientific Literacy in the United States, was conducted by Darren E. Sherkat of Southern Illinois University. Sherkat conducted scientific literacy tests on a sample of people from different religious identities, categorized into the following groups: Non-religious Americans, Non-Christian religious Americans, Catholic Americans, Sectarian Protestants and other Protestants.

The scientific literacy tests did not include questions about evolution, the answers to which would have indicated religious belief as much as knowledge of scientific information. The questions were about things such as whether lasers consist of sound or light, and how long it takes the Earth to go around the Sun.

In his statistical analysis of the results, Sherkat controlled for the following variables: Amount of formal education, income, ethnicity, immigrant status, region, rural residence, and gender.

The results showed that religious identity is negatively correlated with scientific literacy. Non-religious Americans were the group with the highest scientific literacy. Non-Christian religious Americans scored higher than Christian Americans.

What couldn’t be determined was causation. It’s not known whether religious belief is causing Americans to become less scientifically literate, or whether religious belief is more attractive to the scientifically illiterate.

Some people may be tempted to look at this study and conclude that people may be predominantly interested in either science or religion, and just don’t have time to learn about both. That interpretation is contradicted by the results of an earlier study, however.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found in a study last year that non-religious Americans have greater religious literacy than religious Americans do. So, it appears that ignorance between religion and science is a one-way street.

Something very cool is coming right up, it turns out. Tomorrow morning, NASA is launching the Curiosity Rover into outer space, to begin a journey to mars.

The large robotic rover will, once on Mars, look for signs of life beneath the Martian surface. Launch is scheduled for 10:02 AM. NASA has a site dedicated to helping people follow the progress of the rover.