...is the Senate too stupid and corrupt to represent the American people?

They are both stupid and corrupt. Corruption makes them willfully ignorant. I guess they do not give a shit about their children or grandchildren.

stupid and corrupt, and it has been long years since more than a very few have made even the faintest of efforts to represent the people.

Senate was never meant to represent the people. That was to be the role of the House. The Senate was to be the chamber of the elites, sorta like the old House of Lords in the UK, empowered to put the brakes on the "mob" of the House. The people didn't even directly elect senators until 1913; formerly, they were selected by state legislators. Mossbacks like Antonin Scalia, they pine for those days. Because the bribery was so much easier then.

…of the telescope to get the big picture.

After all this trying and failing, perhaps it is time to consider that global warming is The Plan. It really doesn't matter what the cause is. (The big fight over whether climate change is caused by human activity is ultimately irrelevant. Some want settled science to declare it human-caused, because that suggests it can be "human-fixed. That's unlikely with available technologies. Others believe that ambitious environmental remedies will bring little but ongoing economic hardship to the table. In any event, no one will live long enough to see the outcome.) Is there a better approach?

James Lovelock, the environmentalist and scientist who dedicated his life to climate change, gave us the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s. He takes a long view of Earth's future, and sees the planet as not just a rock, but a complex, self-regulating organism geared to the long-term sustenance of life. Thus, if there are too many people for the Earth to support, which forces the very rapid extinction of other planetary species, Gaia – Earth – will find a way to get rid of the excess, and carry on.

That's the way nature works up and down the cosmi. Preserving the diversity of life; because diversity is mechanism of adaptation and survival in an evolving Universe.

A decade ago, Lovelock predicted that billions would be wiped out by floods, drought and famine by 2040. He is more circumspect about that date these days, but he has not changed his underlying belief that the consequences of global warming will catch up with us eventually. His conviction that humans are incapable of reversing them – and that it is in any case too late to try – is also unaltered.

Lovelock's concern is less with the survival of humanity than with the continuation of life itself. Against that imperative, the decimation of nations is almost inconsequential to him. "You know, I look with a great deal of equanimity on some sort of happening – not too rapid – that reduces our population down to about a billion," he says, five minutes into our meeting. "I think the Earth would be happier ... A population in England of five or 10 million? Yes, I think that sounds about right." To him, even the prospect of nuclear holocaust has its upside. "The civilisations of the northern hemisphere would be utterly destroyed, no doubt about it," he says, "but it would give life elsewhere a chance to recover. I think actually that Gaia might heave a sigh of relief."
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He contends that the end of the world as we know it began in 1712, the year the Devonshire blacksmith Thomas Newcomen invented the coal-powered steam engine. It was the first time that stored solar energy had been harnessed in any serious way, with effects that now "grip us and our world in a series of unstoppable events. We are like the sorcerer's apprentice, trapped in the consequences of our meddling". Newcomen's discovery set in train more than just the era of industrial development. It also marked the start of a new geological epoch, the "Anthropocene", the most significant characteristic of which, Lovelock believes, has been the emergence of "an entirely new form of evolution" that is one million times faster than the old process of Darwinian natural selection.
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"Life on Earth, based as it presently is on carbon, cannot last beyond 100 million years, because by then it will be too hot. The evolution of a different life form based on some more heat-resistant element – such as electronic silicon – could potentially extend life by another 500 million or even a billion years. But first, of course, mankind has to survive the immediate global warming crisis."

Lovelock is a famously outspoken critic of the green energy revolution, especially wind power, which he describes as "an absolute scam. A great big German scam". The purveyors of wind turbines and solar panels, he says, are like 18th-century doctors trying to cure serious diseases with leeches and mercury. Instead he wants us to embrace nuclear fission, a completely clean energy source that he regards as a "gift". The Western world's prejudice against nuclear – underscored earlier this year when the number of reactors in the US dipped below a hundred for the first time in decades – is "tragic".
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But even a wholesale switch to nuclear power, in his view, would come too late to solve humanity's principal problem, which is overpopulation. The old post-war goal of sustainable development, he says, has become an oxymoron and should be abandoned in favour of a strategy of sustainable retreat. He is scathing about the very idea of "saving the planet", which he calls "the foolish extravagance of romantic Northern ideologues". The vast sums of money being invested in renewable energy would be much better spent on strategies designed to help us survive and adapt, such as flood defences.

Above all, he thinks that we should embrace the ongoing global shift towards urban living. It would, he insists, be far easier and more economic to regulate the climate of cities than our current strategy of attempting to control the temperature of an entire planet. The regions beyond the cities would then be left to Gaia to regulate for herself.

http://europe.newsweek.com/james-lovelock-saving-planet-foolish-romantic...

Government mitigation on climate change is all kabuki. Surely that's clear to most folks by now. The big money is being spent on preparing the military to deal with the impacts of global warming. Human don't have the technology to re-atmosphere a planet. Seriously.

The first time I heard about climate change, I had only one question: "Which part of earth would be the most pleasant place to live during the full effects of global warming? Have those area's been mapped by the scientists yet?"

All these years later, that question has still not been addressed. But I figured some of it out.

I'm onboard with Gaia. I'm a dedicated high rise dweller with indoor growing skills

ymmv.