Tag Archives: environmentalism

Natural AC: Five plants that can dehumidify for free

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Tillandsia Royalty Free Stock Images

I’ve been looking around for natural methods to combat humidity for those days when the air-conditioner fails….or in places where it isn’t used.

For instance, AC isn’t as popular in Europe as it is in the United States.

That’s for a variety of reasons – including greater environmental awareness, better built homes, and popular fear of illness from constant exposure to cold air. Many Europeans think  air-conditioning makes you sick.

[Read this American tourist’s AC-induced cultural-shock in France.]

AC is also a lot of maintenance and expense.

So, finding a way to get humidity down without becoming dependent on a complicated mechanical device has got to be attractive to anyone with a survivalist bent.

There are several well-known natural methods to reduce humidity, but they still take quite a bit of effort and not all the ingredients are easy to come by in developing countries.

One of them requires hanging cheese-cloth (or gunny, burlap, or jute) bags of rock-salt from the ceiling, with buckets beneath to catch the water as it drips down.

Rock-salt is a desiccant, which means it extracts the moisture from the air until it is water-logged itself.

If you’ve ever had a salt-shaker that got clogged on humid days, you know how that works.

By the way, the solution to moisture in salt-shakers is simple – throw in a few grains of raw rice. They’ll absorb moisture in the shaker and keep your salt dry.

If rock-salt (salt with large crystals) is unavailable where you live, you can also spread table-salt in pans and leave them on counters or shelves. Table salt will absorb some atmospheric moisture until it’s too wet do absorb any more.  After the salt becomes water-logged, it can still be heated, dried, and reused.

Other dehumidifiers include baking soda , silica, and charcoal briquets. They do well as desiccators, but they’re not cheap in many places and they need to be replenished…or, in the case of silica, heated for reuse.

I’ve never tried salt or silica this way, so I don’t know if it actually has an appreciable effect on the humidity inside a house that’s worth the effort and clutter of pans and bags all over the place.

A simpler and more aesthetic method would be to grow indoor plants that absorb humidity.

At first, this seems counter-intuitive, because most plants add to the moisture content of the air.

If you live in an arid area, humidifying plants can be very useful.

That’s besides all the other proven benefits of house plants – purifying the air, improving mental focus and general health, speeding up healing, and making it easier for you to breathe.

Still,  there are a few plants that reduce humidity or at least balance it.

DoItYourself.com has a list of five “plant dehumidifiers” that are easily grown indoors:

1. The Peace Lily, which needs watering just once a week and sucks in moisture from the air the rest of the time.

2. The Reed Palm, which also purifies the air.

3. English Ivy, which you can hang from the ceiling out of your way, where it will reduce humidity and take care of airborne mold.

4. Boston Fern, which balances the humidity in the air, in addition to reducing it.

5. Tillandsia (also known as air-plant), which doesn’t even need a root system to absorb water an nutrients from the atmosphere.

The catch to this list is that when I researched the names of plants that add to humidity indoors, three names on this list –  the peace lily, the English Ivy, and the Boston fern – showed up on the list of humidifiers as well.

So, if humidity is a severe problem where you live, it might be better to just stick with the Reed plant  (one of the most useful plants in permaculture) and Tillandsia.

Tillandsia, a type of bromeliad, needs no soil and very little watering and can be mounted on cork, wood, wire, twigs, on a shelf or wall cabinet.

Climategate: Indian Environment Minister Says IPCC Wrong On Glaciers Melting

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There are some interesting developments on the climate-gate frontier.

Apparently, the Himalayan glaciers aren’t melting, after all.

Or at least, not as fast as the IPCC (the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change , the UN body tasked with climate change) thinks they should. Continue reading →

Lew Rockwell On The Climatista Totalitarians

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Lew Rockwell in The Misesean Vision:

“Let me give another example of the banality of evil. Several decades ago, some crackpots had the idea that mankind’s use of fossil fuels had a warming effect on the weather. Environmentalists were pretty fired up by the notion. So were many politicians. Economists were largely tongue-tied because they had long ago conceded that there are some public goods that the market can’t handle; surely the weather is one of them.

“Enough years go by and what do you have? Politicians from all over the world, every last one of them a huckster of some sort only pretending to represent their nations, gathering in a posh resort in Europe to tax the world and plan its weather down to precise temperatures half a century from now.

“In the entire history of mankind, there has not been a more preposterous spectacle than this!

“I don’t know if it is tragedy or farce that the meeting on global warming came to an end with the politicians racing home to deal with snowstorms and record cold temperatures.”

Climate-Gate Is The Work Of A Whistle-blower

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Excellent demonstration by Lance Levson, a system and networks administrator with fifteen years experience, that the climate-gate data could not have been the work of a random hacker but was most likely that of a whistle-blower publishing documents previously collected pursuant to a freedom of information act (foia) request- After a lengthy technical analysis of the sources of the email and data, he concludes:

“I suggest that the contents of ./documents didn’t originate from a single monolithic share, but from a compendium of various sources.

For the hacker to have collected all of this information s/he would have required extraordinary capabilities. The hacker would have to crack an Administrative file server to get to the emails and crack numerous workstations, desktops, and servers to get the documents. The hacker would have to map the complete UEA network to find out who was at what station and what services that station offered. S/he would have had to develop or implement exploits for each machine and operating system without knowing beforehand whether there was anything good on the machine worth collecting.

The only reasonable explanation for the archive being in this state is that the FOI Officer at the University was practising due diligence. The UEA was collecting data that couldn’t be sheltered and they created FOIA2009.zip.

It is most likely that the FOI Officer at the University put it on an anonymous ftp server or that it resided on a shared folder that many people had access to and some curious individual looked at it.

If as some say, this was a targeted crack, then the cracker would have had to have back-doors and access to every machine at UEA and not just the CRU. It simply isn’t reasonable for the FOI Officer to have kept the collection on a CRU system where CRU people had access, but rather used a UEA system.

Occam’s razor concludes that “the simplest explanation or strategy tends to be the best one”. The simplest explanation in this case is that someone at UEA found it and released it to the wild and the release of FOIA2009.zip wasn’t because of some hacker, but because of a leak from UEA by a person with scruples.”

Climate-Gate: Media Ignored Scientific Back-Trackers

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This story back in September ought to have made a lot of headlines, but didn´t. Perhaps it will now:

“When a leading proponent for one point of view suddenly starts batting for the other side, it’s usually newsworthy.

So why was a speech last week by Prof. Mojib Latif of Germany’s Leibniz Institute not given more prominence?

Latif is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is the recipient of several international climate-study prizes and a lead author for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has contributed significantly to the IPCC’s last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously.

Yet last week in Geneva, at the UN’s World Climate Conference — an annual gathering of the so-called “scientific consensus” on man-made climate change — Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering “one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.”

The global warming theory has been based all along on the idea that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would absorb much of the greenhouse warming caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, then they would let off that heat and warm the atmosphere and the land.

But as Latif pointed out, the Atlantic, and particularly the North Atlantic, has been cooling instead. And it looks set to continue a cooling phase for 10 to 20 more years.”

My Comment

Now why would Latif come out with this suddenly? Maybe he had a peek at some of that data the CRU scientists were trying to hide and decided to dissociate himself in advance from a scandal threatening to blow up…