Tag Archives: weather

5 Easy Ways to Use Essential Oils for Spring Cleaning

by ShelliEbersbach Posted on April 5, 2016

Have you started your spring cleaning yet? It can be a daunting taskespecially when you know there’s dust, dirt and germs lurking everywhere!

Certain essential oils that have antimicrobial properties can help you get your entire home spic and span in a natural, chemical-free way. Best of all, you can choose what scents you like best and combine them to take advantage oftheir unique properties and make your whole homesmell better than ever.

Here are a few suggestions for some common household chores you may be planning to tackle this spring.

Combine eucalyptus, tea tree and lemon essential oil as a fragrant spray for your closets.

Spring is always a great time to go through your closets so you can toss what you don’t wear anymore and stock it with all your clothing for warmer weather. Since closets are one of those dark, crowded areaswhere the air can get kind of stale, you can grab a spray bottle, fill it with 1 1/2 cup of water plus eight drops each of eucalyptus, tea tree and lemon essential oiland then give your closet a thorough spray to freshen it up.

Useplain old water, vinegar and your favorite citrus essential oil to wash windows and window sills.

It’s refreshing to open the windows to let the spring breeze air into your home, but this can also bring your attention to how dirty and dusty they may be after a long winter. Mix 1 1/2 cup white vinegar with 1 cup water and eight drops each of lemon, grapefruit, wild orange, lime or a combination of these all in a spray bottle for a beautifully fragrant and effective solutionto wash and wipe down all your windows.

Create a mixture of wild orange, sandalwood and clove essential oil to wipe down doorknobs, handles, buttons and switches.

We all know that germs spread easily when infected people touch things that other people touch. It’s time to kill off any signs of cold and flu season for good by wiping down anything that’s regularly touched by multiple people with a mixture of water and bacteria-fighting essential oils. Eight drops each of wild orange, sandalwood and clove diluted in 1 cup of water will smell amazing and kill anything nasty that’slingering on stuff in your home.

Add lemon essential oil to some tissues or cotton balls to add to your vacuum cleaner’s canister.

Lemon essential oil is one of those super powerful oils that has antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral and antibiotic properties. By sticking a few tissues or cotton balls soaked with 5 to 10 drops of lemon essential oil into the canister of your vacuum, the oil will diffuse throughout your home and eliminate that dusty vacuum cleaner smell.

Fill a bucket with water, vinegar and peppermint or lemon essential oil to mop your floors.

Believe it or not, essential oils are versatile enough to work on almost any type of flooring including hardwood, tile, linoleum, ceramic, vinyl and laminate. Since spring is when all the critters wake up and sometimes make their way into our homes, peppermint oil will be your best friend in helping you ward off mice, ants and other insects. You could also use lemon essential oil if you’re intention is to disinfect. Add 1 cup vinegar plus 15 to 20 drops of essential oil to a bucket of water and get mopping!

Before purchasing essential oils, make sure to do your research. The most inexpensive varieties are used for aromatherapy and aren’t nearly as pure as therapeutic grade oils. Find out more about what you need to consider when shopping around for essential oils.

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6Natural Alternatives to Toxic Toothpaste
Tips for Keeping Your Makeup Clean & Infection-Free

Photo Credit: Thinkstock

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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5 Easy Ways to Use Essential Oils for Spring Cleaning

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Here’s the Latest on the Epic Snowstorm Bearing Down on the East Coast

by RegenaDegree879 Posted on January 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Yes, 2015 was the warmest year on record. And yes, parts of the East Coast are in for big snow and ice storms this weekend. Those two facts are not contradictory.

With that out of the way, here’s what to expect from Winter Storm Jonas.

The latest forecast from the National Weather Service shows “a potentially paralyzing storm” that could affect up to 50 million people, NWS director Louis Uccellini told reporters Thursday afternoon.

“Right now, the heaviest snow starts in the mid-Atlantic late Friday afternoon and then progresses up to the New York City area by Saturday morning,” he said.

The heaviest snow impact is likely to land on Washington, DC:

Especially in New York and New Jersey, where snowfall could be up to one foot, major flooding is also predicted, on par with what you would expect from major hurricane landfall. Farther south, Uccellini said, Kentucky and North Carolina could face ice storms and freezing rain. Through the weekend, he said, East Coasters should expect delays affecting highways and air travel. The electric utility in DC said it has hundreds of crew members standing by to fix downed electric lines, and Port Authority workers in New Jersey are preparing to insulate underground train systems from the flooding:

As my Climate Desk friend Eric Holthaus explains at Slate, this storm is “the real deal.” Uccellini said his staff are working around the clock (and sleeping in their offices) and doubling the number of weather balloons being dispatched to get the best up-to-date forecast. But even now, he said he was surprised by the unusual level of agreement across a wide range of models, satellite reports, and other data sources. In other words, chances are slim that the storm turns out to be a nothingburger.

“I would suggest people pay attention to this system,” he said.

The upshot: Now’s the time to buy some bottled water and batteries, and don’t drive to work tomorrow if you can help it. Oh, and, uh, make sure to tweet responsibly:

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Here’s the Latest on the Epic Snowstorm Bearing Down on the East Coast

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Deadly Missouri Flooding Forces Town Evacuations as Water Continues to Rise

by SuzanneForwood Posted on December 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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At least 20 people have been killed by severe flooding in Missouri, where several towns along the Mississippi River have been forced to evacuate due to rising floodwaters that are predicted to break records in the next few days. Such catastrophic, widespread flooding hasn’t been seen in the region in over two decades.

Earlier this week, Gov. Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard. He has warned residents to avoid traveling throughout affected areas. Many who were killed were reportedly driving into flooded zones.

The St. Louis Dispatch reports several major highways have been shut down throughout Missouri. Untreated sewage from a nearby treatment plant was also spotted flowing into the Meramec River. On the other side of the Mississippi, in Illinois, inmates at a state prison were also transferred.

As of Wednesday, federal officials were continuing to monitor 19 levees in the region.

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Deadly Missouri Flooding Forces Town Evacuations as Water Continues to Rise

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This Map Shows Where the Next Clean Energy Gold Mine Is

by WallaceHartmann Posted on November 11, 2015

green4us

It’s an area half the size of Rhode Island. Shutterstock The desert in Southern California could be in for a climate-friendly makeover, after the Obama administration released its plans to develop more renewable energy projects on federally owned land. On Tuesday the Interior Department released the final version of a plan that would open up about half a million non-contiguous acres—half the size of Rhode Island—for projects such as wind and solar farms in the Mojave Desert and surrounding areas. It would also more than double the amount of land dedicated to protecting delicate desert ecosystems that are home to vulnerable species, including the desert tortoise. The Mojave Desert, which stretches across most of Southern California, is a potential gold mine for clean energy. Earlier this year, the world’s largest solar farm opened there, near Joshua Tree National Park. According to Interior, the desert and the its surrounding area have the sun and wind potential to support 20,000 megawatts of renewable projects, about equal to the amount of solar energy installed nationwide today. In announcing the plan, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said that public lands will “play a key role” in helping the United States meet its goal of procuring 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources (excluding large hydro dams) by 2030—up from about 7 percent now. But over the past few years, efforts to develop all that potential have sparked clashes between clean energy buffs and conservationists who don’t want to see pristine landscapes blanketed by vast arrays of solar panels. One pioneering project, the Ivanpah Lake solar farm, became a pariah after environmental groups said that it encroached on tortoise habitat and that its sunlight-concentrating panels were blasting superheated rays into birds’ flight paths and killing tens of thousands of them. Subsequent estimates put the death toll much lower, but the Ivanpah controversy underscored just how hard it can be for government planners to find common ground between competing environmental interests. The new plan (finalized in October but made public Tuesday) is meant to clear the air by painstakingly analyzing a 2 million-acre swath of Southern California and offering a comprehensive take on where to focus clean energy development. Scientists and planners from a host of agencies stockpiled research on wildlife, water, agriculture, historic and cultural sites, and other features in an effort to find spots that have high renewable energy potential with minimal environmental impact. In the map below, the pink and red areas are where the Bureau of Land Management recommends that private developers focus their efforts. Orange and blue hatching shows areas proposed for conservation: BLM Anyone who wants to build a wind or solar farm in these areas still has to go through the normal permitting process that any development on public land has to clear. But the plan is meant to help developers avoid headaches by showing them the areas that the feds have already decided are either not ecologically sensitive, or that are already too degraded to worry much about building in. That’s a departure from the previous modus operandi, in which federal officials made case-by-case decisions on each proposed project. “It’s a real change from how BLM has approached renewable energy development in the past,” said Erica Brand, California energy program director at the Nature Conservancy. The agency, she added, is “protecting desert landscapes by directing development to areas that are more degraded.” Similar reviews of private and state-owned land will be released over the next year. And you can bet that there will be plenty of interest from renewable energy companies. California has the country’s most favorable investment climate for renewable energy, according to Ernst & Young, and the state recently adopted the country’s most aggressive renewable energy target: 50 percent of its electricity mix by 2030. That’s up from 20 percent now. “The [Mojave] Desert has some of the most intact natural landscapes in the lower 48,” Brand said. “As we transition to cleaner energy sources, and work to meet our climate goals, we also have to keep those natural resources intact.”

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This Map Shows Where the Next Clean Energy Gold Mine Is

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This Map Shows Where the Next Clean Energy Gold Mine Is

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Saving the forest for the beers

by Myrna Posted on October 22, 2015

Beer relies on healthy, functioning forests. Without those forests, it’s difficult to find clean water. And without clean water: no beer. Source:  Saving the forest for the beers ; ; ;

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Saving the forest for the beers

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The Drought Is Making California Mudslides Even Worse

by Jonatho39T Posted on October 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Mudslides stranded hundreds of motorists on Southern California’s main north-south highway Thursday evening after severe thunderstorms rocked the area. Cleanup crews worked through the night to plow and scoop up the mud, but meteorologists say that thanks to California’s historic drought, widespread wildfires, and a potentially historic El Niño, this disaster could be just a taste of what’s to come this winter.

The rain was part of a slow-moving storm system that passed through the Los Angeles area Thursday afternoon and battered the mountains to the north of the city in Kern County. The result: flash floods that sent mud and debris flowing down hillsides and onto Interstate 5, as well as onto a smaller state highway. I-5 has been cleared and is waiting final inspection to re-open, but hundreds of cars are still stuck on the state highway.

According to National Weather Service meteorologist Robbie Munroe, it’s too soon to be certain how much we can blame El Niño for the storm—El Niño tends to affect the frequency of storms more than their severity. But if it is the beginning of of a wave of El Niño-linked rainstorms, Californians should start bracing for more flooding and mudslides. There are two reasons for this:

Normally, plants and trees are what hold the soil together, says Munroe. But drought and wildfires have decimated plant life in many areas of California. So when heavy rain flows down slopes, it brings mud and debris along with it.

Second, the drought has dried out and hardened the ground. This can be especially dangerous on hillsides and in canyons like the ones surrounding the highways buried by Thursday’s storm. Instead of being absorbed into the soil, rainwater deflects off of it and continues careening down the hill, picking up velocity and washing out whatever is in its path.

Munroe says there is one potential upside to yesterday’s storm: Rainfall early in the season could loosen the soil and rejuvenate ground cover, hopefully mitigating the destruction caused by the weather that will arrive later this winter.

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The Drought Is Making California Mudslides Even Worse

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Another Long, Hot Summer of Catcalling Is Coming to a Close

by ChelseyUyc Posted on October 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hannah Giorgis writes about the endless struggle with catcalling in New York City:

After another summer spent shrugging off men’s loud assessments of my body any time I left my apartment, I am exhausted. And as the streets thin out and the weather cools to a temperature less accommodating of men who consider catcalling a leisure sport, I am increasingly able to pause and feel the depth of my own fatigue.

….Every outing involves dozens of split-second decisions. The short, loose dress or the long, form-fitting one? The almost-empty subway car or the crowded one? The shorter route or the more well-lit one?….My mind can only make so many daily calculations before it slips into what social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister calls “decision fatigue.” Processing each of these useless equations takes a biological toll on my brain, leaving it more inclined, as the day wears on, to look for shortcuts.

Read the whole thing. Or, if you’d prefer a video dramatization of what it’s like, check out the YouTube below.

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Another Long, Hot Summer of Catcalling Is Coming to a Close

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Predicting the climate is hard. So one scientist wants to cut corners

by GretcheHarold Posted on May 12, 2015

supermodel problems

Predicting the climate is hard. So one scientist wants to cut corners

By on 12 May 2015commentsShare

Computer scientist Krishna Palem says we should make climate models less “exact.”

Think of it like making a bed: You can meticulously even out, fold, and tuck everything in all the right places — or you can just roughly flatten the sheet and blanket before throwing on the comforter, and it all looks the same in the end. Right, mom?

The problem with current climate models is that they already take an insane amount of computing power, and they’re still inadequate. The most meticulous, high-powered number crunching is still unable to capture local, small-scale processes like cloud formation. So the basic idea of Palem’s “inexact computing” is that, in certain circumstances, computers can afford to skimp on accuracy in order to save on time and energy. Here’s more from The New York Times:

Current climate models used with supercomputers have cell sizes of about 100 kilometers, representing the climate for that area of Earth’s surface. To more accurately predict the long-term impact of climate change will require shrinking the cell size to just a single kilometer. Such a model would require more than 200 million cells and roughly three weeks to compute one simulation of climate change over a century.

What scientists really need to run such absurdly large simulations are entirely new supercomputers — ones that can handle a billion billion calculations per second:

Such machines will need to be more than 100 times faster than today’s most powerful supercomputers, and ironically, such an effort to better understand the threat of climate change could actually contribute to global warming. If such a computer were built using today’s technologies, a so-called exascale computer would consume electricity equivalent to 200,000 homes and might cost $20 million or more annually to operate.

Well, shit … what was that about corner-cutting alternatives?

Dr. Palem says his method offers a simple and straightforward path around the energy bottleneck. By stripping away the transistors that are used to add accuracy, it will be possible to cut the energy demands of calculating while increasing performance speeds, he claims.

His low-power crusade has recently attracted followers among some climate scientists. “Scientific calculations like weather and climate modeling are generally, inherently inexact,” Dr. Palem said. “We’ve shown that using inexact computation techniques need not degrade the quality of the weather-climate simulation.”

Indeed, in a paper published last year, Palem and his colleagues showed that a mini model of atmospheric dynamics still worked when they ran it with inexact computing. Palem is now looking for money to test the method on full-scale climate models.

Of course, some people will always insist that inexact computing — like half-assedly made beds — is inadequate. Here’s hoping climate saboteurs stick with their “I’m not a scientist” schtick on this one and resist taking cheap shots at something they truly don’t understand.

Source:
A Climate-Modeling Strategy That Won’t Hurt the Climate

, The New York Times.

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Baked Alaska

by Myrna Posted on March 17, 2015

If the Last Frontier is the canary in the climate coal mine, we’re in trouble. Bear Glacier, Alaska, in 2007 Tim Hamilton/Flickr Earlier this winter, Monica Zappa packed up her crew of Alaskan sled dogs and headed south, in search of snow. “We haven’t been able to train where we live for two months,” she told me. Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, which Zappa calls home, has been practically tropical this winter. Rick Thoman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Alaska, has been dumbfounded. “Homer, Alaska, keeps setting record after record, and I keep looking at the data like, Has the temperature sensor gone out or something?” Something does seem to be going on in Alaska. Last fall, a skipjack tuna, which is more likely to be found in the Galápagos than near a glacier, was caught about 150 miles southeast of Anchorage, not far from the Kenai. This past weekend, race organizers had to truck in snow to the ceremonial Iditarod start line in Anchorage. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska tweeted a photo of one of the piles of snow with the hashtag #wemakeitwork. But it’s unclear how long that will be possible. Alaska is heating up at twice the rate of the rest of the country—a canary in our climate coal mine. A new report shows that warming in Alaska, along with the rest of the Arctic, is accelerating as the loss of snow and ice cover begins to set off a feedback loop of further warming. Warming in wintertime has been the most dramatic—more than 6 degrees in the past 50 years. And this is just a fraction of the warming that’s expected to come over just the next few decades. Read the rest at Slate. Read more –  Baked Alaska ; ; ;

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Baked Alaska

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Climate Change Is Baking Alaska

by SherrylKilburn Posted on March 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared in Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Earlier this winter, Monica Zappa packed up her crew of Alaskan sled dogs and headed south, in search of snow. “We haven’t been able to train where we live for two months,” she told me.

Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, which Zappa calls home, has been practically tropical this winter. Rick Thoman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Alaska, has been dumbfounded. “Homer, Alaska, keeps setting record after record, and I keep looking at the data like, Has the temperature sensor gone out or something?“

Something does seem to be going on in Alaska. Last fall, a skipjack tuna, which is more likely to be found in the Galápagos than near a glacier, was caught about 150 miles southeast of Anchorage, not far from the Kenai. This past weekend, race organizers had to truck in snow to the ceremonial Iditarod start line in Anchorage. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska tweeted a photo of one of the piles of snow with the hashtag #wemakeitwork.

Read: Freak floods flattened Eagle, Alaska. One man’s race against the water.

But it’s unclear how long that will be possible. Alaska is heating up at twice the rate of the rest of the country—a canary in our climate coal mine. A new report shows that warming in Alaska, along with the rest of the Arctic, is accelerating as the loss of snow and ice cover begins to set off a feedback loop of further warming. Warming in wintertime has been the most dramatic—more than 6 degrees in the past 50 years. And this is just a fraction of the warming that’s expected to come over just the next few decades.

Of course, it’s not just Alaska. Last month was the most extreme February on record in the Lower 48, and it marked the first time that two large sections of territory (more than 30 percent of the country each) experienced both exceptional cold and exceptional warmth in the same month, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. All-time records were set for the coldest month in dozens of Eastern cities, with Boston racking up more snow than the peaks of California’s Sierra Nevada. A single January snowstorm in Boston produced more snow than Anchorage has seen all winter. The discrepancy set off some friendly banter recently between the Anchorage, Boston, and San Francisco offices of the National Weather Service.

The terminus of Bear Glacier in Alaska’s Kenai Fjords National Park in 2002 (above) and 2007 (below). USGS

USGS

Alaska is at the front lines of climate change. This year’s Iditarod has been rerouted—twice—due to the warm weather. The race traditionally starts in Anchorage, which has had near-record low snowfall so far this winter. The city was without a single significant snowstorm between October and late January, so race organizers decided to move the start from the Anchorage area 360 miles north to Fairbanks. But when the Chena River, which was supposed to be part of the new route’s first few miles, failed to sufficiently freeze, the starting point had to move again, to another location in Fairbanks.

On Monday, Zappa and her dogs set out on the 1,000-mile race across Alaska as one of 78 mushers in this year’s Iditarod. A burst of cold and snow are in the forecast this week, but for most of the winter, the weather across the interior of the state has also been abnormally warm. To train, many teams of dogs and their owners had to travel, often “outside”—away from Alaska. Zappa ended up going to the mountains of Wyoming.

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Climate Change Is Baking Alaska

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