Give the conjugate base to each of the following species

I recently listened to a talk by a climate skeptic, or was he a climate denier? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lOsmfAO2Gs&feature=youtu.be) It was a mix of factual information, confused information and left out information. Most of the experiments presented in this talk supported the idea that more carbon dioxide can make plants, and some animals, grow bigger. While some of his points were interesting, overall I found his talk selectively misleading. The speaker frequently conflates carbon dioxide levels with other climate change factors.
It’s always good to begin a talk with points that everyone can agree on. Everyone agrees that carbon dioxide is necessary for plants to survive and grow. It seems reasonable that more of this important building block, carbon dioxide, could make a plant grow bigger, and maybe faster too. Carbon dioxide is plant food and if there isn’t enough, plants will starve. Not only that, the earth would freeze. But, that’s a problem for a different time. Currently, there’s plenty of carbon dioxide to feed the plants on earth.
Now, throw in a little water, and in return plants make oxygen and glucose (and cellulose from the glucose) for the rest of life on earth. That sounds like a fair trade. Glucose also supplies energy for the plant and anything that eats the plant and anything that eats anything that eats the plant. Glucose is also in equilibrium with many other bio-molecules that are essential for life (glycolysis, TCA cycle, ATP, NADH, electron transport and more). These are all good things. So, does that mean we would benefit from more CO2 in our atmosphere?
I offer this analogy. Human beings need glucose since our brain cells do not store any and they pick it up from the circulating blood. In fact, the brain requires about 20% of our daily calorie needs to keep itself going. If our glucose levels drop too low, we can become hypoglycemic, possibly lose consciousness, even to the state of death. When brain cells recognize glucose levels are falling they start switching to ketone bodies, which build up during times of fasting or starvation in order to keep the brain alive. This is ok for awhile, but not good long term.
How do we know this? Well, many, many dedicated scientists studied very complicated biochemistry over the past century, wandering through a maze of mysteries. There were many false leads and corrections along the way, where scientists debated competing hypotheses. The end result is that our knowledge of the biochemical world is vastly more certain than ever because of science. Our knowledge is not complete, and it never will be, because biochemistry is too complicated. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find useful predictors of health and disease from an imperfect blood panel.
Plants need carbon dioxide and our brains need glucose. According to the talk, the speaker’s main point seems to be “if a little is good, more is better” (repeated over and over with every example of bigger and bigger plants with higher and higher levels of CO2). We can apply the same logic to glucose in the blood, also necessary for life. If we continue our usual diet and add one large candy bar each day, our blood levels of glucose will be higher and we will start to get bigger. Let’s add 2, then 3 extra candy bars each day. Our blood levels of glucose get even higher and we will get even bigger. This is a good thing, right? If we were deficient in calories, that might be true.
But wait, too much glucose in our blood can lead to obesity and diabetes, which leads to inflammation of blood vessels leading to blindness, periodontal disease and loss of our teeth, kidney disease, pregnancy problems, nerve damage and diabetic foot (often requiring amputation). Maybe there are other factors besides getting bigger that have to be considered.
For example, in global warming, there is also increasing temperature to consider when CO2 levels go up. When the levels of carbon dioxide are just right, about 280 ppm over the past many thousands of years, they help keep earth’s average temperature around 15C/59F, which is good for much of life. It is claimed that without our greenhouse gases, earth’s average temperature would be more like -18C/0F, too cold for many life forms. The earth would be a big ice cube and growing enough food to feed life on earth would be a major problem. On the other hand, too much carbon dioxide causes the opposite problem, and the earth cooks. For humans on earth, we need the ‘Goldilocks amount” of carbon dioxide: ‘just right’.
The speaker presents a simi-quantitative graph showing different levels of carbon dioxide and water. He argues that when there is more carbon dioxide in the air, the stoma of leaves can be smaller and retain more water, but there is nothing on the slide that mentions anything about leaf stoma and water retention. Stoma are openings on the bottom of leaves allowing carbon dioxide to be absorbed. Both water and carbon dioxide are incredibly small molecules that have absolutely no problem diffusing in and out of leaf stoma. If water is present as 1% of air, it concentration would be about 10,000 ppm, while CO2 is just over 400 ppm. It’s likely that the size and number of leaf stoma is more related to the levels of carbon dioxide, than water. The main conclusion from the qualitative graph appears similar to his initial comments, that more carbon dioxide makes a plant grow better, no matter what the water level.
The speaker emphasizes that trees and sweet corn continue to do well, even up to 100F. Maybe some plants can adapt to 90+ F temperatures, but not everything is able to do so. To emphasize his point he uses Phoenix, Arizona as an example of how you can grow sweet corn anywhere in the US at high temperatures, and what could be higher than Phoenix in the summer. .
So, how does corn grow in Arizona? I’ve listed the top 5 corn producing states below, and Arizona’s ranking and production and the total amount of corn produced in the US. Maybe growing corn in Arizona isn’t quite as great as the speaker implied? Also, the very small amount of corn grown in Arizona was grown in late spring and early fall, not in the summer.
State/ranking (2016) millions of bushels percent of US production
Total corn produced: 15,148 bushels 100%

1. Iowa 2,740 18.09%
   
2. Illinois 2,256 14.89
   
3. Nebraska 1,700 11.22%
   
4. Minnesota 1,544 10.19%
   
5. Indiana 946 6.25%
   

33-35. Arizona 11 0.07% (3 way tie with New Jersey and Wyoming)
http://beef2live.com/story-states-produce-corn-0-107129
Additional research on plants and carbon dioxide may find useful exceptions that provide greater insight about what factors are most important. Maybe special genes can be introduced or modified to make a plant more heat tolerant, able to live with less water and/or more salt in the water. There are many factors that can affect the way plants (or we) grow and many variables that can be affected by carbon dioxide (or glucose) in their own unique way. The outcome of one variable (size of a plant correlated with CO2 levels) does not necessarily correlate with all other outcomes (heat of the atmosphere, melting ice, acidification of ocean waters, etc.).
Even if some plants can live at higher temperatures, maybe other life forms have a hard time living at high temperatures, like us, for example. If the temperature gets up towards 105F, and there is very high humidity, we are cooked, literally. Our enzymes begin to denature and quit working in the vicinity of 105F. If the air is dry we can perspire and the evaporation can help keep us cooler, but if the humidity is high (> 90%), then we will succumb to heat exhaustion, and can die because we have no way to cool down. As long as one of the two variables is ‘lower’ we can survive, but if both get too high, we can’t.
If I took the speaker at face value with respect to high CO2 and temperature, I would expect these conditions to provide lots of green vegetation, thriving with the extra carbon dioxide and heat. However, when I hike through the Southern California foothills on hot summer days, I do not see green as the dominant color, I see brown everywhere (not to mention occasional smoke and fires). The brown is partly due to the other critical molecule, water (or lack thereof). While all of this seems reasonable, I’m certain we don’t understand every detail. Pretending none of this makes any difference can lead us to a dead-end, literally.
The speaker makes an emphatic point about the greening of earth, which shouldn’t be too surprising since plants are getting more carbon dioxide to munch on. This is a good thing for plants, but is it the only thing? The following comes from a web page on Popular Science titled: “Satellite Data Show the Earth is Getting Greener” (2015). Once again, we find there is more to the story than the speaker told us.
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[ "It isn't often that environmental scientists get good news. But a new study in Nature Climate Change found that for the past few years, the earth has been getting a little bit greener, accumulating an additional 4 billion tons of biomass (vegetation) between 2003 and 2012. That's a good thing, because plants take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, locking harmful greenhouse gas away in the new growth.
Now to burst your carbonated bubble; this study wasn't looking at a direct connection between the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and plant growth. Even if the extra plants make a difference, the fact is carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been rising steadily for decades.
The additional green came from a few places: In former Soviet countries, forest started to grow back over farmland, while in China, massive tree planting campaigns seemed to do the trick. The researchers also found that more arid areas had a lot of vegetation as well, including shrubs in savannas in Africa, Australia, and South America.
The researchers used numerous satellites to look at changes in vegetation over the years. They looked at microwave radiation bouncing off the Earth's surface, and by pulling together data from the different satellites, they were able to get a month-by-month idea of how much living plant matter was on our planet for the past 20 years.
While in recent years it seems like things are looking up, the prognosis isn't entirely rosy. The team still found huge amounts of deforestation in the rain forests of South America and Southeast Asia. Those findings line up with another report from earlier this month that noted that deforestation in rain forests seems to be increasing. Not only that, but the areas where vegetation is spreading (like the savannas) are highly sensitive to changes in climate. A particularly dry year (or years) could kill off the new vegetation and put us right back where we started." ]
https://www.popsci.com/new-study-shows-earth-getting-greener
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Almost all of our heat on earth comes from the sun light (electromagnetic radiation = EM). The regions of the EM spectrum that are most important to earth are the high energy ultra violet (UV = dangerous), visible (the colors that we see) and lower energy infrared (IR we experience as heat). It is estimated that the sun puts out a tremendous amount of energy, 4x10^26 Watts (joule/second), but only about 2x10^17 Watts strikes the earth. About 30% of that is reflected back to space and about 70% is absorbed at the surface. If we could capture and store a fraction of that energy, we wouldn’t ever need to worry about fossil fuels. But we haven’t completely solved those problems yet, so fossil fuels are still part of our equation. There are some good ideas out there, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, possibly nuclear and others. Deniers will tell you none of these ideas can compete with fossil fuels, but nothing ever competes in its early days of discovery, even fossil fuels. New ideas in science always take time, and trial and error to work the kinks out.
I am not a climatologist, I am a chemist and I have been for over 50 years (recently retired). In my job I took thousands of spectra (IR, various types of NMRs, MS, UV) and did lots of other experimental stuff. I looked at the IR spectra of water and carbon dioxide almost every day from 4000 cm-1 (2.5 mm) to 500 cm-1 (20 mm). It was the background IR spectrum of air that was subtracted from all routine organic IR spectra. Anyone reading this can Google “background IR spectrum” to see what one looks like.
The main IR energy absorbing bands in air are from H2O and CO2, and mostly, they do not overlap. This means that all the bands have heat absorbing potential from molecular vibrations (stretching and bending modes), as long as none of them have been maxed out by other greenhouse molecules (nitrous oxide, methane, ozone, chlorofluorocarbons, are all present in much lower amounts, though they are stronger absorbers). Water bands are around 3500+/- and 1500+/- and carbon dioxide are around 2250+/- and 800+/- cm-1. Once CO2 and H2O are excited by background heat (IR), those molecules quickly relax by transferring their energy via collisions with other molecular substances, and do it all over again and again and again for as long as they are in the atmosphere because the sun shines on earth every single day. By the slow process of convection, the heat is distributed throughout the atmosphere. It’s like a “bell” that can be rung over and over forever. It is this property that helps the atmosphere retain heat. As mentioned above, in the right amount, this is a good thing and helps make life possible.
Water is actually a stronger heat absorbing molecule than CO2, but since 70% of the earth’s surface is water, there’s nothing we can do about water. The variable that affects water the most is temperature because the vapor pressure of water increases as temperature increases. The more water in the atmosphere, the more heat retaining potential it has. The partial pressure increase is pretty small for a 1C increase (25C à 26C increases water vapor pressure by 23.8 torr à 25.2 torr, delta = 1.4 torr). However, the atmosphere is so large that even a small increase in vapor pressure, adds a lot of water. I estimate about 1.5x10^15 moles of water (3x10^16 grams) added, assuming a 10 mile deep atmosphere. That calculates out to about 10^17 joules to heat the added water 1C. Each 1C increase in temperature adds to this effect.
Because liquid water has a large heat capacity, it can absorb a lot of heat. In the short term, the temperature of the atmosphere does not go up as much as it might if the oceans weren’t there. This is an advantage when earth’s temperature is going up because it provides a long time lag for increasing temperatures. But, it also means that the oceans retain heat better and are slower to cool down. Oceans act like a giant heat reservoir that can affect our environment (like melting ice), and delay the consequences of increased heat for decades, or even longer.
You don’t have to take my word for it, test it yourself. Take two similar size ice cubes and put one in a medium bowl and at the same time put the other ice cube in a similar size bowl about half full of tap water. Start your watch and see how long it takes them to completely melt. When I did this, the ice cube in the bowl with water melted in 8 minutes, while the ice cube in the empty bowl took 92 minutes. This will give you a feeling for how fast a glacier on land takes to melt by absorbing heat from air compared to an ice berg out floating in the ocean absorbing heat from water. I didn’t actually do it, but try the same experiment with hot water. Make a prediction before you try it and see what happens. I bet you will be right. This is how science works and helps us to make decisions using the best information available. Believing in people who denigrate science and its methods will lead us back to the dark ages.
Yet another problem with glaciers is when the melt occurs at the bottom of glaciers it allows them to race to the ocean much faster, because of the reduced friction. Once the ice hits the oceans, the melt rate greatly accelerates and adds extra water to our oceans.
Even though water has a larger capacity for retaining heat, carbon dioxide is the key, because carbon dioxide is the factor that can throw off our balanced, comfortable world that we have enjoyed for almost all of humanity’s existence. In fact, this comfortable world is probably what allowed us homo sapiens to rise to dominance over the past many thousands of years. We owe a world of gratitude to those two little molecules, H2O and CO2, but we have to recognize when there is too much of a good thing, just like glucose in our blood.
Now, one little CO2 molecule hardly does anything by itself, but I calculate that there are about 10^40 CO2 molecules in the atmosphere. None of us know what that number is, but if you keep multiplying by 10 at some point it will start to have a significant effect, and If you multiply by 10 again and 10 again, it goes off the chart. But, is the amount of carbon dioxide large enough to do everything the climate scientists say it does?
It’s time for another analogy. Microwaves are lower energy than IR radiation and provide an everyday heating example that occurs much quicker than IR heating of the atmosphere. Because microwaves have longer wavelengths (lower energy), they can penetrate deeper into the food item cooked and heat everywhere at once, unlike IR radiation, which heats our atmosphere by convection. Lower energy microwaves tend to excite rotations of water molecules, which then continually relax by slamming into other molecules and transfer their kinetic energy (heat) throughout the sample. Just like the carbon dioxide “bell” that can be rung over and over, the water “bell” in a microwave sample can be re-rung (re-excited) over and over and over, with a result that our food gets hotter and hotter, until it cooks.
The energy source for a microwave oven isn’t the sun, but typically a 1200 watt (joule/second) energy source. Pretty quickly things heat up because the sample is so small and the radiation is focused. But, leave your popcorn in 1 minute over the required time and most of us know what happens: charcoal. IR energy is 100 to 1000s of times greater than microwaves, so it seems reasonable that IR radiation can also do some serious heating.
Because the world is so big (atmosphere and oceans), rising CO2 levels usually take 100s to 1000s of years to heat up instead of 2 minutes. We aren’t looking at a large temperature increase to cook food, we are looking at a small temperature increase that melts ice. And, we are heating 10^40 CO2 molecules, 5x10^41 water molecules, 5x10^37 methane molecules, etc, over and over and over. It seems reasonable to consider that higher CO2 levels can overcook the world, if we wait awhile. The worry for our time is that we are adding CO2 so fast that it may only take decades to centuries to do this instead of centuries to millennia. Do we have a choice?
Humans started recording an average world temperature in 1880-1889 (13.71C/56.71F). It’s hard to know what those early average temperatures mean, considering the state of the world back in 1880. Temperature measurements today are more reliable and more spread out, including satellite measurements. The most recent complete decade, 2000-2009 recorded average temperatures of 14.51C/58.12F. Those are pretty small increases, for the entire earth over 130 years (delta = 0.78C/1.41F). However, about 0.51C/0.92F of that increase occurred since the 1970-1979 decade. Even more disturbing is that above 64N latitude the temperature increase from 1880-1889 to 2000-2009 was 2.5C/4.5F, with most of the increases coming in the recent decades, 1.8C/3.24F. Overall recent decades show temperature increases of about 0.2C/0.36F per decade. If that were to continue for the entire 21st century, average world temperature would rise about 2C/3.6F. The flooding resulting from such a temperature increase would cause colossal problems for coastal cities, fresh water tables and food growing coastal deltas. Our current decade is not finished (2010-2020), but the 4 warmest years on record have all occurred since 2014. That means the last 4 years are the hottest yearly average temperatures on record! Deniers will tell you it’s a fluke, climate change scientists will tell you it’s a trend, heading in the wrong direction. It won’t be surprising if 2018 makes it 5 out of 5. (You can use the mouse scroll wheel to expand or shrink the graph.)
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature
These higher temperature readings come with major consequences such as sea level rise and climate effects. Any sort of positive feedback mechanisms could make things worse (like increasing methane and/or changing ocean currents). Of course there is a big IF in front of all of this, because this is an experiment humans have never done before. The problem is we only get one chance to do it, and if we screw it up, too bad for those future humans. Deniers, such as the speaker in this video, advocate higher carbon dioxide, because the plants are hungry for more. However, to ignore the dire consequences of global warming would require iron-clad, 100% proof that there are no dangerous consequences. Considering the down side possibilities, this is a dangerous gamble. So far, deniers haven’t offered that iron-clad, convincing proof.
The speaker also discussed ocean acidity, which increases when atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolves in the oceans (lowering the pH). At first this was thought to be a good thing because it slows down the increase in temperature of the atmosphere. However, carbon dioxide reacts with water and makes carbonic acids, which makes the oceans more acidic. In a research paper, mentioned by the speaker, hydrochloric acid was used to adjust the pH of the solution. The speaker dismissed the use of hydrochloric acid and the research that used it as something totally different than carbonic acid. Once again, the speaker misled us.
First off, there is no hydrochloric acid in aqueous HCl. Since HCl is a strong acid, it dissociates completely to hydronium ion, H3O+, and chloride, Cl-. Chloride is in every living life form on earth, including us, and is essential to all cellular function. It is also present at significant levels in the oceans, so it is not really anything different than what we already see in our world. Hydronium ion is just a solvated proton on a water molecule, whether it comes from hydrochloric acid or carbonic acid.
The reason scientists use HCl to adjust the pH of acid solutions is because it only affects the balance between another acid (carbonic acid, a weak acid that does not dissociate completely) and its conjugate base (bicarbonate, the other part that forms when a proton is lost). The pH is just a number that helps determine the balance (ratio) between a conjugate base and its conjugate acid. The other variable to consider is the actual concentration of the acid, itself, in solution, independent from the pH. This too can go up when more carbon dioxide dissolves in the oceans. It is a moderately complicated equilibrium when considering all of the molecular species, and looks something like the following. The < arrows indicate equilibria and H (+1) represents hydronium ion.
H2O + CO2 < H2CO3 < H(+1) + HCO3(-1) < H(+1) + CO3(-2)
The same hydronium ion (H3O, +1) that forms when HCl dissolves in water also forms when carbonic acid (H2CO3) dissociates to bicarbonate (HCO3, -1). The bicarbonate can also dissociate to another hydronium ion (H3O, +1) and carbonate (CO3, -2), which is necessary for shell forming organisms and plankton. Plankton are clearly important and use carbon dioxide and water to make glucose and much of earth’s oxygen via photosynthesis. Plankton also form the base of the ocean’s food chain. More carbon dioxide can allow more plankton to grow (good), but is that the complete picture? Plankton also need other nutrients, and calcium, phosphate, nitrates, silicates and some, even fix nitrogen gas. They are also affected by water temperature, salinity, water depth, wind and what kinds of predators are around. The effect of all these variables can only be determined by laborious scientific experiments, something deniers detest and discourage at every opportunity.
Surprisingly perhaps, from the emphasis in the talk, plankton (and plants too) do depend on more than “just carbon dioxide”. So, once again, the logic of the talk “If a little is good, more is better,” is flawed. Too much acid (too low of pH) is bad for CaCO3 shells, because it drives the above equilibrium equation backwards, towards carbon dioxide and water. Does that mean that every single organism will be adversely affected the same way by lower pH? Of course not, but some might be, maybe even most. How do we find out? We do the research and scientists are doing just that. Deniers don’t want results, they want ignorance.
You can check this effect out yourself at a faster rate than decades or centuries. Next time you go to the beach collect a little shell and add a few drops of HCl solution to see what happens to it (remember, you are really adding hydronium ions). Another name for HCl is muriatic acid which you can find at a pool supply store because it is used to adjust the pH of a pool. (Just be careful if you use it because it a strong acid. It’s a good idea to wear gloves and wash off your skin if you get any on you.) You will probably see little bubbles on the surface of the shell, which is carbon dioxide forming from the reverse reaction of when the carbon dioxide dissolved in water.
Too much hydronium ion pushing the equilibrium back in the opposite direction is not good if part of your outer structure is made of CaCO3. Too much acid also throws off the many complicated equilibria in living organisms. Our blood pH needs to stay in the range of 7.40 +/- 0.05 pH. Each organism has its own special pH range to survive. Deviate from that tiny range and cells start to die. Ocean pH doesn’t affect humans’ pH, but animals and plants that live in the ocean can be greatly affected. To find out, we have to do the science, which scientists are doing. Just saying pH doesn’t matter is a misleading denier tactic. Being a skeptic means additional experiments to find out where it counts and where it doesn’t.
Clearly this speaker is talking out of his comfort zone. His agenda is not to present honest science, rather he seeks to discredit climate scientists by presenting very selective results that have nothing to do with what he is really attacking (If A is good, then B must also be good and everything else must be good.) He even throws in a cute shrimp and a crab making the crab bigger (more carbon dioxide) and smaller (less carbon dioxide) with a smug chuckle, getting the audience to laugh along with him.
Listening to this speaker, gives the impression that carbon dioxide helps all animals in the crab study. In the actual experiments, all of the animals in the crab study were observed in tanks (not in the wild) fixing all of the variables except carbon dioxide. In all, 18 benthic marine organisms were studied. Blue crabs grew the biggest of any of the animals (up to 4X bigger!) and lobsters and shrimp also grew larger with higher CO2. So, the point is proven, correct? No. What the speaker did not mention in his talk is that higher CO2 levels (lower pH) inhibited the growth of 10 other animals, including oysters and corals and one animal did not show any change. In some cases higher CO2 (lower pH) actually led to dissolution of the shells. The mechanisms for these different results were not discussed and are probably very complicated. That wasn’t the message the speaker wanted us to hear.
This would be ok if the speaker’s misinformation only affected him, but it doesn’t. It affects everyone listening to him talk. Seeing bigger trees and bigger crabs with more carbon dioxide and coming to the conclusion that everything else he says must be true: that carbon dioxide is the greatest thing around, and all the thousands of scientists of the world, getting “biased” grants, are conspirators trying to take away our freedoms and ruin our economy is the message deniers are shooting for. Skeptics, on the other hand, say “I don’t know. Let’s find out.”
In reality, this whole climate change problem is hugely complicated. Very dedicated scientists are working hard to find real answers to get us out of this potential predicament. Simplistic arguments that put us all in danger are not useful. We need solutions, not pretend information that makes fossil fuel companies richer at our expense.
It is the fate of the earth that we are contemplating over the next 100-1000 years. Are you betting pocket change, or are you betting the future lives of the generations to come? Do we just eat, drink and be merry, or do we care to make a better future?
So, I did enjoy parts of the talk and found it interesting how the plants and crabs got bigger with extra carbon dioxide. I’m pretty sure they were grown in some sort of sealed off environment, like a greenhouse or water tank, where the CO2 levels could be controlled. That’s ok because that’s the way science is usually done, one variable at a time. The speaker should have told us there were conflicting results and that there are other factors to consider, but he didn’t. He should not have pretended that his very limited points cancel out all of the other climate change research, but he didn’t. I, personally, don’t want the entire earth atmosphere to have that much carbon dioxide present, considering the current status of what we know. Who cares if blue crabs are 4 times larger, if sea levels are 3 feet higher?
For someone who is science-phobic, this is scary stuff and it’s hard to know how to sift through all of the complicated details. Deniers are counting on that. Even scientists can’t tell exactly how things will play out. It’s not surprising that people become very alarmed, or even hysterical. They are hearing consequences that will happen 100 years from now and thinking it will happen in the next 10 years. There are exaggerators on the alarmists’ side too. Exaggeration on the alarmists’ side leads to paralysis, while distortion on the denial side leads to inaction. Either result puts life on earth at risk, whether it be 10 years, 100 years or 1000 years.
From the YouTube talk, it seemed like the speaker was fine with CO2 levels over 1000 ppm, or even higher. I think anyone seriously considering this problem would have major reservations about having their family and friends live at such high CO2 levels, and probably wouldn’t want to treat them like a tree or crab experiment. We don’t get to do this experiment over and over in our nice little greenhouses. This is a one-time experiment and the greenhouse is earth, our house.
We all need to be more honest in how we view and present the facts. Where there are conflicting results, we need more research. We don’t need science-ignorant leaders trying to squash valid scientific research. We need leaders who believe in science and are willing to confront the problem of climate change head on. It is a very reasonable assumption that we are facing some tough climate change problems that require some cutting edge thinking, right away.
Cheap energy raised humanity above subsistence living and allowed us to live like kings and queens. However, we never thought ahead to more than the next moment and the problems snuck up on us. Society is more fragmented than at any time in my memory. Democracy is in peril in many places. Yet, there is only one way out of this dilemma that affects us all. The world has to come together if we are to have any chance at solving this problem. We did it with chlorofluorocarbons, but that was a relatively trivial problem compared to the energy problem of climate change. Unfortunately, it may take a few more monster disasters to convince humanity of the existential threat to our survival. If climate change scientists are correct, humanity will have to pay a little extra ‘late fee’ for the delay.
What we really need are alternatives that only require moderate sacrifice to switch over to. Forcing change on people won’t work, so we need something else. We need incentives that encourage us to do the right thing. Money is a powerful motivator, but maybe there are other approaches. The power structure is another huge problem. Fossil fuel companies do not want to give up their privileged positions. They have known for decades about the problem of climate change but have only recently acknowledged that fact. They are the most powerful source of denial and we all have to pay the price of that denial.
There are many other serious problems, such as increasing population, declining resources, pure drinking water, poverty, food distribution, global conflicts, mass migrations, nuclear weapons and more. Climate change will compound many of these. From all of the arguments I have looked at, on both sides, I would say climate skeptics and climate advocates are all pretty smart. We shouldn’t be wasting our time and energy demonizing one another. Denial is a dead-end road for all of us. We need to immediately start working together to search for every possible solution to the many problems we face. We have to start decreasing our use of fossil fuels. Immediately eliminating use of fossil fuels would be best, but clearly, that’s not going to happen. Possibly, we could reduce 5% a year for 20 years, as we substitute in alternative solutions. Reductions would have to be strictly enforced to do any good. There’s too much at stake to do nothing.
I’ll leave you with what seems to me to be a very hopeful alternative. If we could make hydrogen gas (H2) from water (bacteria do it and, on a small scale, we can too), we could take that H2 and burn it with oxygen to make energy and water, which we could remake into hydrogen gas as a never-ending, nonpolluting source of energy. No CO2 in the equation. There are some storage problems of this highly pressurized, explosive gas, but that sounds solvable. We already do it with propane. Also, the energy content of hydrogen gas is lower than hydrocarbons, such as octane.
http://oceangeothermal.org/archive-old/hydrogen/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIlonWoc_p2wIVAtbACh3EjQw2EAAYAiAAEgLTtvD_BwE
There are always unforeseen problems, which is why we need to throw resources, money, creative minds and everything else we’ve got, to develop these ideas. We need to educate ourselves about what the problems are and what the possible solutions are. No more being ostriches, burying our heads in the sand. No more denial. Instead, eyes wide open now!

A PHILOSOPHICANL ESSA
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Fairy Tales: A Narrow Escape!***
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(Subtitled: Of Balls & Playfulness)
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October 30, 2017 Draft
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(Yes, yes, it needs to be edited down)
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By
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Anthony Steyning
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"Modern art is what you can get away with," Andy Warhol told us, and his work took the cake. He also paraphrased McLuhan suggesting 'artistic' works get approved not just by the few acting out of sometimes perplexing conviction, but by all those who dutifully tag along. The point at which credulity starts taking it on the chin and the word 'travesty' enters the mind.
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The same manifestation affects conventional philosophy and religion, man's most venerated cerebral and spiritual enterprises. Unchallenged by multitudes thirsting for reverent fantasy and reassurance by way of meticulous analysis and explanation, their self-satisfied proponents taking themselves as seriously as contemporary art's high priests do.
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But does something represent an absolute truth, just because people no longer question it?
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Enough's enough said Buddha about thousands and thousands of Hindu gods; it's man who has to count for something! With Antonin Artaud repeating his notion stating it all when he wrote Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu, asking us to stop this nonsense with our imaginary friend, the subject of our manicured dreams. For if man needed to create myths or fairy tales to deal with his own mind and to step out beyond himself so he could look down upon himself and heal himself or give himself that extra bit of courage and strength in the face of mostly cruel and often endless setbacks, then for a time and despite almost immediate, built-in and mostly silly taboos, this was fine. But superstitions and allegories are usually endless, while the truth, even when complex always turns out to be relatively short. And by beginning to believe his lengthy, embroidered fantasies, his fictions, imposing them as if they were the truth, protecting instant orthodoxies as precious property, he created the beginning of his own degradation. Because fables or myths are dreams, or better still a series of pretty fibs and an elaborate lie however well meant, however well told, represents the seed of destruction that every grand falsehood carries within itself.
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Similarly, what's found at the opposite end of the scale is immodest pride as for its part formal western thought is built on the implication, its point-de-départ, that should we not be there, well, then nothing's really there or worth discussing. That unless a person can give birth to him or herself, our collective death would be the death of meaning. As if this planet had none of it long before we arrived, accommodating millions of years of different life?! And as if all of this doesn't imply carpe diem, that what we see is what we get!
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Philosophy's sole function should be the removal of all nonsense from the world when all it does is confound and compound, never ceasing to create rather than dismiss exquisite, endless, near lyrical examinations and rivalling conjectures! I know, no Sein no Zen, but notions like Heidegger's forever doctrinaire Sein and Dasein or Descartes' Je pense, donc je suis, I think therefore I am, both essentially flawed as deprived of our consciousness 'being' obviously doesn't necessarily and by itself cease to be! Plus that this very Sein sadly also constantly reminds us of our own forthcoming demise and in this capacity represents no life force whatsoever, in a certain way killing one hell of a party. And in Descartes' case the most that we could let him get away with: I think, therefore I am what or who I am (i.e. as opposed to others or animals). Better still what André Breton exhorted: I think, therefore I disturb!, though I obviously prefer Unamuno's simple I am, therefore I think. And what's wrong with I have foresight, therefore I am?
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When re-reading so many hallowed texts then, consider the self-indulgent hokum too often meriting some sort of stage direction saying: STOP! Here Mind Disappears Up Rectum! Because, one more time, after close scrutiny nearly all established conventions ultimately point in one single direction---they confirm our pre-eminence and successful continuity with a mind set far more interested in bunker consolidation and arid preservation than in keeping structures open to further thought and experience. Man still secretly convinced he's the measure of all that matters, that there's some sort of finality to the scheme of things and this finality is him, when most likely there's not even a scheme and the earth not the center of anything, merely the third and most beautiful be it somewhat obese bauble from our sun. For so called nothingness and the absence of human existence or awareness are not synonymous. Eons simply episodes in which nothingness arising from emptiness is not only a non sequitur but a non plus, though the answer to the question 'What is is??' admittedly remains a tempting and elusive one.
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Or those ultimate ones of course 'Where does the Universe itself originate? Why is there some cosmic fabric, this cloth full of glittering mirror balls spinning, spinning like Jacques Brel's La Valse à Mille Temps including not only all the planets, but according to him our minds as well. (On the other hand I'm glad they spin or in our case we'd slide right off, and then what...?)
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-About the Big Bang theory: First there was nothing, and then it exploded... If you can figure that one out, give me a call!
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So what really are electromagnetism, temperature, light, gravity and all their waves? Not only capable of making us and nearby things move, but also matter and mass millions and millions of miles away? All of which we eloquently note, describe, and measure and by the grace of which we live and die, but still cannot factually explain?'
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In the meantime the body of modern western thought mainly deals with the mechanics of thinking and formation of action in thought, called will i.e. to be, is to do. It mainly provides some sort of indexation and supplies comfort through carefully constructed theoretical truths no more real than those large, inane and inanimate wax figures in morbid musea staring us in the face. Something like Gustave Courbet's The Origin of the World, a portrait hyper grotesque and equally self-absorbed. And yet with ultimate intellectual perversion some brazenly suggesting that we're not here at all, that everything is an illusion. Even though, and after the onion soup a toilet door regrettably left ajar pretty well kills off this notion. Yet with all of this there's absolutely no doubt that the mind stays undernourished and utterly useless without developed senses, except for the cerebellum of course, the electric impulse controlling our muscles so we can move and ingest to stay alive.
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Therefore goodbye cognition without sensory perception, but, except in Plato's Cave and in the form of allegory, where are the dissertations which include references to the brain itself, our touch, our ears and our eyes, our neurology? The stuff bottled-thought custodians still ignore, but of which these days entire populations are aware? Those curators who will react to a massive overhaul of modern thinking only if imposed by some Deus Ex Machina, which never seems to come about. For in established philosophy and academically speaking is the nose not glamerous enough? And what is it exactly that sounds created by Schubert, Rachmaninoff or Prince make us cry or shiver with joy? Unleashing emotions that affect our reasoning...!? Not even phenomenologists touching on the flesh and the blood reality of sentience? Yes, which Kant's or Schopenhauer's internal and external paths coincided in each of them, their neurons, neurotransmitters and hormones, to make them arrive at their thought? And should we not first and foremost accept the absolute primacy of certain objects and conditions: a rock, it rains, this gravity, oxygen, you know, details like this? Far removed from human interpretation, memory and Gutenberg tooled retention in order to once and for all prevent the damned tail from wagging the dog? But one never reads any references to them.
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Q: Umberto! Why oh why didn't you write: The Name of the Nose?
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A: Ragazzo, watta are you talking about!?
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At any rate, it did and does always come down to the same and unfortunately remains the canard: I know, who else's, but our take on the world and beyond rules all only because no tangible 'outside' condition prevails showing or teaching us anything clearer or superior. But should it exist it would in all likelihood try to patronize, ridicule us, and then what? Who wins? Anyway even this is strictly academic.
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My point then, with ultimate wisdom, can't we shrugg it off for now? Does there absolutely have to be a 'take'? Has the foul, this different whiff of reckless certainty and learned self-importance not become quite unbearable? Even dangerous in places? Doctors of Divinity and Philosophy at one point having to be dragged out of their sanctum sanctorum, their Prius car or own mind so something like their mirror may help them get over themselves? To get shocked into reality the way I was by a quick but sobering look at my own skeleton, through a revealing X-Ray? Reminding me of our total nakedness and all of us too often forgetting that most of our convictions are linked to moments of structural self-assurance, timeless only in our head?!
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Yes, why not send the tenured and the ordained alone and naked into the Kalahari? While there re-igniting unbiased curiosity and uncertainty, for instance noticing an animal's hide or plumage perfectly assimilating the colours of surrounding? Pure trickery, for defence or for offence, by optical, mimetic, non-tactile transfer, and nature's way of deceiving, the place where we too must have first learned to lie and pretend through our teeth?
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No, I won't get into the kinetic force of it, other than to say this is not contact osmosis. But only one example of somewhere along the line a different, invisible perception/awareness between the animate and the inert occuring that we can't explain and must have included some sort of primal recognition factor. Colours and fake shadows turning into stunning camouflages far, far removed from old parchments, dead idioms, sublime theories and notions. Enough to reject stolid pontification over the excitement of discovery, and also to see how long our desert dweller's severe thirst for certainty outlasts the need for a simple gulp of H2O. For up to now are they, nay, most of us not mere well-fed, self-immersed loungers, owners of self-pleasuring speculation and abstraction instead of acknowledging that our only legitimate possession is the sensuous, the strictly local bearing witness to it all? Even if such down to earth love and admiration goes unrequited, life a beautiful but lousy lover only interested in itself, not persé in us?
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Ah, yes, I can picture it now! A mostly naked body wearing purple socks in burning sand passing by but some elephant shouting 'Man, how can he breathe through his ridiculous little thing, or pick up a peanut with it on the floor!' Or if he were an uncovered she, some wayward, roaming camel roaring 'Hey Joe, dig those puny humps!'. Though probably, and after having cleansed him or herself of all jaded assumption, our nude and two-legged walker starting those fabrications all over again. Amid apparent earthiness still seeking applause and confirmation: finding a tall monolith, sitting down on it to come up with brand new dreams or extravagant explanations and expectations, the way old Simon of the Desert did. But why, for as soon as we stopped building altars and temples and started building hospitals we became so much better off? What a bad habit all this. For the salient question is not how or why life, but why the question itself! Everyone always asking what is the meaning and destiny of man, but unless you're someone like Kafka and his impossibility of crows, nobody simultaneously asking what is the meaning and destiny of elephants. Unless of course it is precisely the meaning of elephants not to have a specific purpose and unable as we are to accept that yes, indeed, we're those elephants with the only real difference between us that while they can't... we sometimes don't question nearly enough. Keeping the field unnecessarily even, maintaining ourselves as the silly beasts we shouldn't be, only smart enough to lock the others up inside a Zoo! What kind of victory is that?! And raising that other immortal question, the one of... What exactly is the purpose of purpose?
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Though on another level when standing before a masterpiece we shouldn't question it as its beauty or ingenuity are understood, self-evident, mystery and answer intertwined! So that while it comes to daily existence yes we must constantly and courageously ask all the pertinent questions with one exception, that last, that final, the big Why?! Because those obsessed with it and in a certain sense, are they not already mostly dead... killed by fanciful fantasy?!
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- Notre Appétit-d'être doit surmonter notre Raison-d'être, it's the only solution!
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It's a fact, there has been only one animal to ever tame itself, uncaging his like only to start caging his mind. This animal, later known as man, simple jumper become ringmaster, after breaking loose from the food chain spoiling it all by trying to place the entire universe on his minuscule shoulders unable to accept that in the end sentience changes so very little! In the process accumulating and piling up real but also spurious wisdom to towering heights while learning to preserve it and permanently pass it on. For contrary to frivolous lore it's not prostitution, but philosophy that's our oldest and most painful profession, though certainly not as well paid. And significant the day we discovered we could even invent 'knowledge', and nothing would strike us down. I'm speaking here not of the so-called original sin, but again, of the original lie. Yes, in classical Greek the word philosophy meaning "love of sophia, knowledge", but isn't it a fact we loved it so much that we started manufacturing it? Simultaneously mystifying and sanctifying it as time went by? Received and soon revered wisdom beefed up more than anything to cater to something deep inside our human psyche, namely our extraordinary vanity, our unquenchable thirst for survival, our need for order, but mostly our dual addiction to certainty and the still deeper emotional need to feel wanted? Knowledge manipulated the way a child closes its eyes pretending it's no longer there, or makes believe it lives in a world with which it feels more comfortable? The formal study of which the pious investigation of old innuendo, of half truth and fantastical conjecture with all recent doubt quashed practically before these studies are undertaken in places where anything new always gets barred?
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Ah, yes, isn't it wonderful..... Everything certain, everything definite, everything definitive even if none of this can be found anywhere under the stars. Just close your eyes and mind and simply forge it the way you've always managed! Plus the Messiah's on his way anyway so you can celebrate once a week and pop his balloons. Even better if on top of this you can self-induce some sincerity; though hundreds of mostly man-child soothsayers of the cloth will by example teach you how to fake even this! In other words an excellent variation on the adage No Sex Please, We're British: Absolutely No Doubts, Please, We're Humans! A set of circumstances and states of mind leading directly to official fantasies, dogma, endless theory and the often terrible powers of possessive suggestion.
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What mastery! What control! King of the hill, top of the heap, are we? Yes Sir! But perhaps more like a fantasizing ostrich sticking its head and neck deep into the sand proclaiming it's the Sovereign of the Savannah, forgetting its feathered arse sticks out and subject to laughter or savage attack. Plus speaking of darkness, unlike the momentary closed eyes of that child, a child eventually snapping out of it, what if we had all been born moles, subterranians, eyeless, yet somehow still with the same ingenuity? How would 'knowledge' have evolved? For there is no molecular reason there cannot be intelligent life without the same old exterior reference points. And would we then have 'imagined' light, days, mountains, oceans, still have invented our gods, our Virgins, God, heaven, the heavens, never even having seen daybreak, seen a bloody thing but darkness? Or no eyes, no skies, and so no pies....? At any rate, for those deriding this playful notion, perhaps they should be more generous. It's doing what they've been doing for centuries, and that is... labouring under assumptions and accepted suppositions a lot. The kind of mental rigidity that has made man earth's such disastrous tenant, eyes firmly fixed on convenient appearances, his brains when possible suspended, as opposed to the child's mind meandering in a small, dreamy playroom, always chasing new worlds.
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-Don't touch that sky, don't touch that mountain, don't touch that theory, it's Sacred, it's Holy, Grrrr, IT'S OURS..!! Better still, and individually, IT's MINE, MINE..!!
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Let's face it, to a blind man all the world goes naked. Affirming that human perception and intelligence are pretty circumstantial and by definition conditional. And what about wisdom, knowledge's incidental step-child, isn't it also bewilderingly relative, particularly in the additional light of everything written in and around us having been so blatantly self-rigged? Oh dear, does this a sinner make, the refusal to be that submissive, ever following, ignorant Agnus Dei? (Thou shalt not eat from the tree of knowledge: Genesis, to which it's proper to respond Sapere Aude: Dare to Think.) Or a positivist and an irascible polemicist? A reductionist? An objectivist? A well-meaning, doubting relativist then? And so on, and so on. Well, no, no, no, no and no again because laborers in the sagacity, veneration or dignity trade measure elevated speculation against elevated speculation, and what is being attempted here is to remove beautiful irrelevance gently in its entirety from its august but withering plinth. Placing it in the playroom, away from that addiction to deterministic promise --- the battle between reason and desire, between fact and fancy having been uneven far too long.
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For hasn't the time come to cease inventing certainties covering that arse? Because I once saw an exhibition of aquarelles produced by Down Syndrome children and they were the most unusual and unimaginably beautiful works of art that I have ever seen. Pointing towards a beguiling world all their own, not one beneath us, but one rivalling ours. And by saying the body perishes and cleverly suggesting the spirit is immortal, in other words that death is birth, where in religion and for that matter in philosophy can this hidden world be found? What happens after our chemicals happen to settle into a different mixture and texture, altering gods, playing fields? Do established disciplines really have any idea what such a person sees and feels, presumably no less real to him or her? And will their 'soul' forever carry on this way: where will 'it' end up? 'Truth' and 'relevance' only to be found in quantity, in volume, because fewer of these people at stake? Yes, what and where is more real, decided upon by whom, especially when the choice is not between onion soup reality or illusion, but between reality that for one reason or another... is multiple? Like with sophistry and its many respectable guises, by implication presenting soothing definitions, yet mostly suitable nonsense and not much more. Or mysticism, escapism of the highest order, though happily mystics don't murder much. Alchemy and black magic then, treated with contempt these days, but not the rest of the hocus-pocus--- collective rationality somehow stopping half way down-road, turning itself inside out, rolling itself into a ball before getting kicked anywhere it wishes to go. Reason turning surreal, or at least slipping into the skin of irrational notions with few noticing or volunteering to admit what's going on.
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Most of this evolving in the epoch between Euclid and Copernicus, when we were visited upon by a thousand years of darkness, a time of reason lost when most of the damage was sustained; the birth of insidious intellectual perversion. And the reason Greek and Roman thinkers such astute theorists mainly because they were free-thinkers, unburdened by intellectual straight-jackets, checks, dogmatic halls of mirrors, double curtains and traps or having to worry about Christmas coming up. Though let it be noted that for all their democratic ideals they also owned slaves so that these chaps were not all genius, far from it, just healthy, free-but-privileged and consequently imperfect otherwise well-adjusted debaters who within Amor Fati believed more in civility and community than in immortality, when after a millennium or more of monotheism all we have to show for are murder, deceit and oppression in massive attempts to corner fluid, free thought. And even now this persisting twilight, these lingering fogs in so many quarters on this planet including these New-Agers who are already quite mad or the truistical notions of Intelligent Design which are nothing more than yet another determinant 'truth' job. All this by people's primal need for someone or something to look after them and leading up to a kind of lethal childishness at times, especially when some start dropping a few bombs in order to make if not prove their point. Unable to accept spontaneity in any shape or form, the smarter completely undesigned part of existence in particular when it comes to the emergence of a variety of ingenious procreation mechanisms signalling death yes, of course, but always accompanied by natural renewal through sexual desire, by itself this naughty trick of chemistry. These folks incapable of simply wondering and marvel, addicted to explanations with built-in, ready-made life-vest theories as always enforced by way of threat and terror as in 'holy' punishment, like the preposterous hanging of poor 'witches' in Salem not that long ago. The beauty of randomness, of never ending natural eruption and chemical combustion escaping those who make sure that absolutely nothing interferes with their convenient but crutch creed. The attempted elimination of certain ideas to them akin to some sort of spiritual lobotomy in the face of which they jump on a horse, draw monstrous swords, howl ferociously and fearlessly attack disagreeing strangers. When strictly speaking 'we' can't 'know' anything, a savage but beautiful gnosis never to be entirely ours for the simple reason that the real truth is both condensed and enormous and often quite beyond us so that it can't be copied, caught, bought, contained or otherwise domesticated; not for private use and hovering above us only for its own magnificence.
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Delusion making religion so addictive, even to a paleontologist and scientist like Teilhard de Chardin who despite millions of years of overwhelming natural evidence to the contrary, managed to remain a Jesuit priest and thus a cake eating, fence sitting creationist, and for some apparently a way to legitimise themselves. Manifesting underpinnings of near sexual connotation, sex so much more than the physical, orgasmic, the blind drive of multiplication, at a deeper level confirming, making man feeling not just accepted, but wanted, needed. With religion, while itself not in need of man, falsely I feel, seen to protect and thereby confirm and so, identical to sex, making people feel so very wanted. And then of course whoever is wanted must be SAFE? Right? Sex and religion, both of them strong and completely irrational sentiments, sharing an irrepressible desire for belonging, a lair for which many will kill if threatened by eviction. Or from where to prudishly divert eyes from what really happens to be the case.
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- Q: Sir, do you believe?
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- A: Man, I believe my ass off!
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So that it is just as derisory for the gullible to claim all is well, that we're needed and looked after purely on the basis of fairy tales, as it is an extreme form of arrogance to shut all doors to mystery, suggesting we already know everything there is to know.
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In other words we should exclude nothing, but believe in very little and also admit that centuries of mainly self-stroking musings have not been a complete waste, far from it. That they were extremely useful in making ethics systemic and having us understand the structures and mechanics of language and thought, never mind the hundreds of immature conclusions which in this process were arrived upon: it was all part of our moral teething, of our growing up. Works, even though radiant, considering the primitive times in which they were conceived, never to be taken as an end onto themselves. As in the case of Spinoza's dozen or so formulae first 'proving' there is a single creator and telling us that God is everything, then concluding in his Ethica that on the contrary, everything is God and thereby to all intents and purposes becoming a free-spirited naturalist atheist, nobly turning his back on constructed belief, on constructed meaning, and in this respect pre-dating Kierkegaard and his 'accompanied' existentialism by a couple of centuries. 'Accompanied' because of the continued attempt by magnificent but gutless fence sitters to have their cake and eat it, too! Unwilling to let go of religion's convenient but false comforts...
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Like Kant's de facto sticking to some abstract God's codes, some God-figure, but still called one of our first modern rationalists. Or someone like Sartre incongruently defining individual sovereignty and freedom for us while an unapologetic Stalinist and having the audacity to denigrate freedom delivering America and its allies in order to laud the lunatic keeper of that vast prison, called Cuba. A typical case of obstinate thinking and erroneous loyalties inevitably leading to concrete betrayals and a more recent example of not only spurious but even duplicitous reasoning and by all accounts a lecher, the reason I call him Jean-Paul Satyr... As with de Beauvoir's political side, in 1939 naively proclaiming that all fear of Hitler was grossly exaggerated, on top of this repeating her stunning moral and political insight when it came to Mao, ten years on. Or Heildigger's lowering his antisemitic Bavarian Lederhosen to get into Hannah's pants, unless this is the tale of a cunning Jewish piglet bagging the big, bad butcher, but either way a man who's still taken seriously merely because his massive, deliberately impenetrable lithurgy reads like a Jackson Pollock drip painting, offering consistent symmetric density by the m2 to please philosophy's strivers. With one big difference, in that stepping back from a Pollock work, like his Number 21, or Mural, it becomes unmistakenly beautiful.
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No, let's just call a spade a spade and brand a lot if not all of this inconsistent, pretentious intellectual and moral posturing, more than enough to temper our natural urge towards hero-worship more than not. At least the way, today, it comes across to ordinary citizens. So with modern language-based deconstruction theories which, pursued to their extreme, lead to a nasty case of decomposition: figure skating all of it, with circles beautifully drawn, exquisite axles and soaring tripple toe loops, just about choking the bishop in mid-air and much coveted medals in the end, seeking, seeking perhaps, but always stuck in the same old ice rink. Beckett stumbling upon it, in Godot, Lucky's soliloquy to be precise, suggesting that massive words don't constitute more life, deliver more meaning or freedom, necessarily deliver anything. And on another level also this simple analogy to ponder: recently Swiss aero-dynamic engineers 'proving' that it's quite impossible for our dear old bumble-bee... to fly!
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And what about all those notions of time? Besides the filling in of distance, isn't time mostly the mental space in which we move? Isn't our ontological 'zeit' immaterial in terms of the universe, given that in all our thinking the fatal inhibitor is our own ephemeral fire-fly status, that old three score and ten business, disqualifying us from participating in issues of enormity, making much vaunted relativity theories so relative that to us and strictly speaking, they become null and void? Lost in the endless waters of space and motion, at least as far as physical man is concerned? And if you don't agree, Prof Dr Heinz Zweidrei-Klean and Herr Dr Schneewittchen of the Max Planck Institute of Extra-terrestrial Physics have accepted to investigate my point, but indicate they'll need 1.3 million 'years' to prove or disprove it. Yes, yes, I jest, or do they? Because in biological terms aren't we mere temporary syntheses? In cosmic terms somewhat ingenious, electro-chemical flames? Yes, man the flame, with the earth and all of life a slow burning fire. Even the tree, that bumble-bee extensions of an even larger fire until he, they or it burn out. And yes, yes, life the flame does repeat itself, but never by leaving things the way they were, making our conjugation 'is', very, very relative and tenuous....
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And also meaning that in the same way that we must deal with inherited credo much more knowingly, we must equally accept that there are limits to our importance and perception. That there will always be more than that smallest universe of them all: this space behind our eyes and between our ears. Images of galaxies thrust together into clusters reaching us through the arrival of 'old' light, the grand irony of something on the surface of things taking place right now, but having been concluded and changed into something entirely different millions of 'our' years ago, and so, to us, no longer a realistic 'truth'. That this, to us, is a bit of an impractical, nay, futile spectacle at which point it is best to sit down, have a cold beer, relax, and pretend that the red galaxy we saw through our Hubble mirror telescope was a squirt of ketchup on its lens. That astonished as we are to find an atom is in fact another pint-sized universe, or at least a solar system with whirling bodies of its own, and earth, for all we know, a proton in an atom in a molecule of some giant leg of lamb, forcing us to stand back and reflect at levels we never contemplated before. That the cosmos as a womb or a universe inside a universe inside a universe and so on are all distinct possibilities and our 'playing with and inside this space', though all too human, not uninteresting and representative of our remarkable yet volatile intellect, but those Big Bang or Unified String theories not having to become obsessions in that there could be many space bangs and ripples, folds and strands beyond our mental range, imagination or sight: the unknowable dimensions. Allowing that presumably there is a method to the cosmic chaos, given that not all chaos is madness. And that, again, while not having to give up all exploration which is in our blood, man has to remain much, much more philosophical in the truest, purest sense of the word: above all no dogma or doctrine at the end of which particularly, forbidding, supposedly 'wise' men tend to lose no sleep over calling for mass murder and mayhem!?
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It's all very well and sometimes entertaining, though what does it all really matter when there's every possibility the human species itself might have disappeared or been eclipsed in say 20.000, 30.000 years in the way that strains of insects were found frozen in time and inside droplets of primordial amber? Man the new fossil, our current collective umbilical cord already stretched to roughly 200.000 years, isn't it going to snap at one point? There being only so much genetic mileage to be extracted from the overly complex human mammal, plus given that as organised societies we've been around a scant 8000 'years' (with our very limited perspective branding the first of these as existing in 'antiquity', though happily one historian, when asked what influence the Roman Empire had exercised on modern western society, retorting that it was much too recent a situation for him to comment on!), and yet not organised enough to suspend the depletion of our planet when looking at its diseased atmosphere, oceans and forests, its festering coastlines?
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Of course it can be argued that there's nothing to worry about, that nothing disappears in thin air, the earth 'forever' feeding on itself in the way that forests live on their own fallen leaves, branches and trunks, over the ages pumping up hundreds of thousands of tons of oxygen each day, the very atmosphere and topsoil covering otherwise inhospitable rock. But then also consider that we may be too clever to survive, humanity not that forest, only one among its many branches, one becoming way too heavy for its own good and ready to break. Or put differently, humanity found hanging from its own family tree, done in by natural factors which include itself, a sad case of Omphalos lost...

This is probably a stupid question, but I'm a bit stumped.
I'm reviewing the Henderson Hasselbalch equation, and I know that it is used to determine pH for a buffered solution with a weak acid/conjugate base pair, but my question is: why is the pH of the solution ever anything other than the pKa of the weak acid pair.
I know that this is obviously not true, and that as you add more H+ or conjugate base, you will change the pH, but if the weak acid is in equilibrium defined by a constant ke so that:
HA(aq) + H2O(l) <- H3O+(aq) + A-
won't adding any more HA or A- just keep the solution at the pKa because the reaction will shift toward products/reactants to maintain equilibrium? I guess that is the whole point of a buffer, but why, at a certain point, does equilibrium get "overwhelmed" and no longer apply? Won't the solution always move toward equilibrium, regardless of how much of a species is added?