Resolved: Whatever

West Virginia mountain stream.

Finally, there has been some great progress made in the US Senate to address climate change, in much the same way progress was made on the Great Wall of China when King Zheng of Qin turned to his minions and said, "you know, if we had a wall here, we could hang pictures."

Yes, the US Senate has addressed climate change ("hello, climate change"). Led by the new Republican majority, it passed a measure in which global warming was alluded to as a thing that might actually be happening after all, not that we had anything to do with it. It is a Sense Of The Senate statement, a declaration of consensus with all the impact of "we like long walks along the beach" or, in this case, "what-ever." The climate changes all the time, it was pointed out, which is why we have both galoshes and tube tops and the freedom to choose, God bless America.

W. Va. stream downhill from coal mine.

Because sober minds do not believe it makes any sense to suggest that anything mere humans can do could possibly affect something so vast as the planet's atmosphere. In fact, it's arrogant. It's an insult to God to suggest that man can repaint the heavens.

And it's certainly beyond the pale to intimate that there is any correlation between the observed current global warming trend and the fact that over three hundred million years ago plants developed bark and got absolutely huge and sucked massive amounts of carbon out of the air and pooted out oxygen and made life just fabulous for giant cockroaches and termites while vast expanses of shallow seas and swamps flooded and drained over and over again for, like, sixty million years, and ultimately buried all that solar energy that was stored in the big plants and fossilized it so that the carbon was tucked neatly underground, while the atmospheric concentrations of oxygen and carbon dioxide settled into percentages that were not maybe as ideal

New, improved, engineered ex-mountain stream.

from the point of view of the giant cockroaches and termites but ultimately worked out better for other folks like salamanders and dinosaurs and, golly, us too, which is really good because that's how we were able to thrive and develop big wrinkly brains and figure out where all that sixty million years' worth of sequestered carbon was hiding and begin to haul it out of the ground where it had been for the last 300,000,000 years and burn almost all of it right the fuck up in about 200 years at a geometric rate that just happens to perfectly mirror the rise in the planetary temperature and the carbon load in the atmosphere because, Junior, there is such a thing as coincidence. Coincidence. Which means completely unrelated events that happen at the same time from which there is no reasonable conclusion to be drawn.

Yes, my darling Republicans in the US Senate, absent divine whimsy, there's no explaining coincidence. Nothing to be made of two things that happen at exactly the same time and track each other as precisely as stink and roadkill, or disco pants and John Travolta. Or your agenda and the Koch Brothers'. You ignorant sluts.