Category: Climate Change

PBS: Wash Your Clothes In Cold Water – Reality: Bacteria Like It Cooler

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PBS is ranting away at people for not doing enough to fight climate change.

“Washing clothes in cold water can save up to 15 pounds of carbon emissions per load, depending on your washing machine and your energy supplier.”

“Lower the water heater temperature from the normal preset of 140 degrees Fahrenheit to 120,” Heede said. “That’s easy enough, and it prevents scalding by friends and visitors.”

PBS are idiots.

The average pair of clean underwear still contains about 0.1 grams of feces and could hold up to 10 grams, according to a Journal of Infection study led by Charles Gerba, PhD, microbiology professor at the University of Arizona. (Could the fact that this surprisingly high percentage of people don’t wash their underwear be to blame?)

If you aren’t already doing your laundry in hot water, it might be time to start. Anything below a hot cycle of 140 degree Fahrenheit won’t do much against bacteria, says Dr. Gerba. Cold water is “designed to get clothing clean but not eliminate microorganisms,” he says. Using an activated oxygen bleach detergent like OxiClean or Clorox 2 can sanitize your clothes, even if you don’t want to throw your delicates in hot water, says Dr. Gerba. (Don’t miss these other 7 tricks for washing clothes without ruining them.)

Without hot water and bleach, bacteria from your underwear can spread to other clothes in the wash too. Unloading that “clean” laundry into the dryer gets bacteria on your hands, which means you could spread it to other fabrics or even up your risk of infection by spreading the bacteria to everything you touch. Keep your underwear separate from the rest of your laundry to avoid spreading the germs, suggests Dr. Gerba. (Find out how often you should be washing your towels—most people don’t clean them enough.)

Even those best practices might not get rid of bacteria completely, though, because those germs don’t just disappear after your clothes have been in the laundry. (Learn how to tell if you use too much laundry detergent.) Some of that bacteria—including E. coli—stick around in the machine after the cycle is over, says Dr. Gerba. Washing your underwear last will keep that away from your other loads, but you should clean the machine itself by running an empty cycle after every underwear load. “Give the washing machine a mouth wash by running bleach through it and killing bacteria left,” he says.

And then there is Legionnaires Disease, which is temperature sensitive.

* 70 to 80 °C (158 to 176 °F): Disinfection range
* At 66 °C (151 °F): Legionellae die within 2 minutes
* At 60 °C (140 °F): Legionellae die within 32 minutes
* At 55 °C (131 °F): Legionellae die within 5 to 6 hours
* Above 50 °C (122 °F): They can survive but do not multiply
* 35 to 46 °C (95 to 115 °F): Ideal growth range
* 20 to 50 °C (68 to 122 °F): Legionellae growth range
* Below 20 °C (68 °F): Legionellae can survive but are dormant

Climate warming experiment finds unexpected results

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It’s always a surprise when they actually do experiments on the main tenets of the church of climate change.

Tropical forests store about a third of Earth’s carbon and about two-thirds of its above-ground biomass. Most climate change models predict that as the world warms, all of that biomass will decompose more quickly, which would send a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But new research presented at the American Geophysical Union’s 2018 Fall Meeting contradicts that theory

Stephanie Roe, an ecology Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia, measured the rate of decomposition in artificially warmed plots of  in Puerto Rico. She found biomass in the warmed plots broke down more slowly than samples from a control site that wasn’t warmed.

Her results indicate that as the climate warms, forest litter could pile up on the ground, instead of breaking down into the soil. Less decomposition means less carbon dioxide released back into the atmosphere. But it also means less carbon taken up by the soil, where it’s needed to fuel microbial processes that help plants grow.

The money quote:

But instead of seeing faster rates of decomposition, Roe observed the warming produced a drying effect in the plots, which slowed decomposition. “What we found is actually it went the other way because moisture was impacted so much,” Roe said. Moisture in the litter from the treatment sites was reduced by an average of 38 percent.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-01-climate-unexpected-results.html#jCp

Camp Century Greenland: 8m Under The Ice in 1959 and 35m Under The Ice in 2016

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Interesting article about Camp Century.

Howerever the funny part is where the Guardian tries to claim that “climate change” is going too melt the ice and expose radioactive materials when in fact the ice cover has gone from 8m in 1959 to 27m in 2016.

I don’t see any melting!

The US army engineering corps excavated Camp Century in 1959 around 200km (124 miles) from the coast of Greenland, which was then a county of Denmark.

Powered, remarkably, by the world’s first mobile nuclear generator and known as “the city under the ice”, the camp’s three-kilometre network of tunnels, eight metres beneath the ice, housed laboratories, a shop, a hospital, a cinema, a chapel and accommodation for as many as 200 soldiers.

 

Read the rest