“Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts.” That’s become a common saying among climate change activists in recent years, but the observation doesn’t go far enough.

The accurate sentiment should be something more along the lines of, “Reality doesn’t negotiate.”

However far advanced we’ve become technologically, however closely some might believe we’re approaching “the singularity,” the fact remains that the physical world remains ruled by the basic rules of physics. We can’t create energy out of nothing. No one will ever build a perpetual motion machine. The laws of thermodynamics can’t be “glamored.”

For those who would try, though, those rules don’t apply.

Remember the Bush Jr. advisor’s disdain for the “reality-based community” back in the early 2000s? Their GOP successors don’t even acknowledge such a community anymore: today’s Republicans and tea-baggers essentially believe they can legislate away any reality or truth they find inconvenient. “Reality-based” scientists these days can present as many facts, graphs, charts and models as they like, but if the right-wing doesn’t like the implications, it’s shown itself more than ready to vote the truth out of existence, as far as as laws of the land are concerned. The result, in a split Congress, is, as Democratic Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts recently put it, a “legislative Schrödinger’s cat” … alive in the House while “simultaneously being dead in the Senate.”

That might work for a while, maybe even into the next election cycle or two. But, sooner or later, reality-based reality will make its presence known. No matter how vehemently the anti-reality crowd might make its case, sooner or later, someone will eventually open Schrödinger’s box to see whether the cat inside is alive or dead.

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