“Nobody takes care of what everybody owns.”

In case any of you thought conservatives were actually coming around on the climate issue, take Grover Norquist (please!). He is head of Americans for destroying the global commons Tax Reform and “arguably Washington’s leading right-wing strategist,” the “Field Marshal ” of the Bush tax cuts for the rich.

Norquist makes one of the most unintentionally revealing comments I’ve ever heard from a hard-core anti-government conservative about the inherently destructive nature of modern U.S. conservativism. It occurs at the end of a short N.Y. Times magazine interview today (see here). Let me start with Norquist’s paean to self-destruction:

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A top NASA scientist just emailed me the breaking news: “The ice age expired!”

Even more shocking — the rate of warming this year has been just about unprecedented in the historical record — even faster than Climate Progress had predicted just last month based on the NASA data from February (see here).

Just look at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies dataset (here). While January’s land-ocean global temperature was a mere +0.12°C above the the 1951-1980 average and the February anomaly was +0.26°C — the March anomaly was a staggering +0.67°C.

[Warning -- the following chart is not suitable for children or those who believe in global cooling. Please cover their eyes since the 2008 data, plotted in red below, might give them nightmares.]

This leading NASA scientist was himself stunned by the “temperature derivative” — geek speak for the rate of change. At this rate I’m afraid, we have only a couple of decades before the Earth becomes another Venus.

My advice to you: Hug your children, make love to your spouse, sell your beachfront property, and then spend your entire life savings as quickly as possible — assuming, of course, that three months of data can be used for climate projections. And, heck, if one month’s data is good enough to get stories on climate cooling from leading journalists at the Wall Street Journal (“Little Ice Age? Cold Snap Sparks Cooling Debate“) and New York Times (“Climate Skeptics Seize on Cold Spell“), three months ought to be enough for front page stories that change your entire life.

OUR CHANGING WEATHER CLIMATE

When we first reported this story (here), the Earth was in the death grip of an Ice Age that had lasted an unprecedented 4 or 5 weeks, nearly one-millionth the duration of recent Ice Ages. Earlier this year, websites were trumpeting bleak headlines like “Solar Activity Diminishes; Researchers Predict Another Ice Age“) or “Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming.” Or, for those who prefer geek-talk over bleak-talk, it was time for an “Update on Falsification of Climate Predictions,” as Roger Pielke, Jr. put it.

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