Elaine Meinel Supkis Even as Mega Typhoon Ioka heads towards Asia with its 200 mph winds and 50' waves, there is no real hurricane season in the Atlantic. Coming on the heels of the most active season on record, this total reversal is another sign of the destabilization of our climate. The Midwest is uder a very severe, long drought and getting worse each month. So much for burning corn as gasoline or heating fuel.
A terrible drought is getting worse.
By MONICA DAVEY Published: August 29, 2006 MITCHELL, S.D.
With parts of South Dakota at its epicenter, a severe drought has slowly sizzled a large swath of the Plains States, leaving farmers and ranchers with conditions that they compare to those of the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s.
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Gov. Michael Rounds of South Dakota, who has requested that 51 of the state’s 66 counties be designated a federal agricultural disaster area, recently sought unusual help from his constituents: he issued a proclamation declaring a week to pray for rain.
“It’s a grim situation,” said Herman Schumacher, the owner of a livestock market in Herreid, S.D., a small town near the North Dakota line where 37,000 head of cattle were sold from May through July, compared with 7,000 in the corresponding three months last year.
“There’s absolutely no grass in the pastures, and the water holes are all dried up. So a lot of people have no choice but to sell off their herds and get out of the business.”
Drought experts say parts of the states most severely affected — Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming — have been left in far worse shape because of recent history: several years of dry conditions, a winter with little snow and then, with moisture reserves in the soil long gone, a wave of record heat this summer.
The main rivers feeding the Mississippi on the west flank are running very low. Farmers in the headwaters are complaining they must reserve water to flow downstream. The Colorado River which is one of the main rivers from the west side of the Rockies, is a tiny trickle when it struggles past Nevada, Arizona and California, all of which take 99% of the waters. The upper end of the Gulf of California is extremely brackish due to the lack of fresh water discharges. It was quite noticable when I was a child and used to play at the beach there, picking up star fish left behind when the tides rolled out.
Just like all other times when bad times come to farmers, there are obvious price changes. In this case, as always, the price of livestock plummets as everyone is forced to sell off their livestock.
During the great Dust Bowl drought, so many farmers sold off so much the prices fell tremendously.
1933: Over 6 million young pigs are slaughtered to stabilize prices With most of the meat going to waste, public outcry led to the creation, in October, of the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation. The FSRC diverted agricultural commodities to relief organizations. Apples, beans, canned beef, flour and pork products were distributed through local relief channels. Cotton goods were eventually included to clothe the needy as well.
May 1934: Great dust storms spread from the Dust Bowl area. The drought is the worst ever in U.S. history, covering more than 75 percent of the country and affecting 27 states severely.
The heartless capitalists running America decided to 'save' the farmers by raising the price of food. The method they hit upon was to destroy food. They poured milk into the gutters while children had rickets due to lack of calicum and were begging for table scraps. They burned bread, they wantonly destroyed food all over America rather than feed anyone. President Roosevelt stopped this madness as soon as he could persuade everyone to allow him to distribute food to the starving.
This goes to show exactly how maniacal theorists can be. Our present crop of psychophants (heh) will not hesitate to starve millions to death if this is good for someone's bottom line. Roosevelt was afraid of revolutionaries taking over which is the argument he used in private when trying to persuade the heartless rich to please not kill lots of fellow Americans just so someone could make a buck.
March 18, 2004 - (date of web publication) NASA EXPLAINS "DUST BOWL" DROUGHT NASA scientists have an explanation for one of the worst climatic events in the history of the United States, the "Dust Bowl" drought, which devastated the Great Plains and all but dried up an already depressed American economy in the 1930's.
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The model showed cooler than normal tropical Pacific Ocean temperatures and warmer than normal tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures contributed to a weakened low-level jet stream and changed its course. The jet stream, a ribbon of fast moving air near the Earth's surface, normally flows westward over the Gulf of Mexico and then turns northward pulling up moisture and dumping rain onto the Great Plains. As the low level jet stream weakened, it traveled farther south than normal. The Great Plains dried up and dust storms formed.
The research shed light on how tropical sea surface temperatures can have a remote response and control over weather and climate. It also confirmed droughts can become localized based on soil moisture levels, especially during summer. When rain is scarce and soil dries, there is less evaporation, which leads to even less precipitation, creating a feedback process that reinforces lack of rainfall.
It is the typical feed-back problem. When the ground gets drier and drier, it dries out the atmosphre, too. Roosevelt used excess labor to plant millions of trees all over America. Some of the trees on my neighbors' part of the mountain were planted back then. These treelines helped stop the dust bowl and trees not only hold moisture and keep the sun off the ground, keeping the soil wetter, they also alter the wind patterns.
During the eighties, when family farms, hammered by high fuel costs and low farm produce prices, began to fold in ernest, most of them disappearing into giant corporate farms, the new owners didn't want trees blocking the mega harvesting and plowing machines so they cut them down, all over the place.
And the idea of contour plowing, introduced by Roosevelt's team, was thrown away, too. I wrote years ago, 'All we need is for the jet streams to change slightly and all will be turned into dust.' And so it is. This is why science coupled with history is so vital for us all.
Like a flashlight in a dark room, we can see what happened before us and can then guess what will happen next. Right now, 'inflation' is being kept 'low' due to the panic selling going on. This situation will continue until all the excess animals and machinery is removed, killed or put into new hands. Once the farmer's markets are cleaned out, the really relentless price hikes will begin.
Already, a great deal of the corn crop is slated to be used as fuel what with the foolish, stupid biofuel laws Congress passed. Since the price of oil is still high and still volatile, the desire to keep corn prices high will encourage turning corn into fuel. This means the world's store of corn will drop. This condemns millions of people suffering from droughts, for these droughts are world-girdling, to death.
In 1970, a corn epidemic devastated the Midwest and caused stock market panics. Immediately afterwards, inflation took off thanks to a sudden rise in world oil prices and the bills for Vietnam coming due at the same time we had to reduce military spending and employment making bombs to drop on civilians (I see a pattern here! heh!).
Here is an earlier Great Drought that hammered the Midwest and Southwest from 1170-1250 AD.
Around 1250, the Anasazi were again on the move. They abandoned their mesa-top pueblos and cliff dwellings. They headed back to the lands in the south that they had left a few generations before. This time, they built their pueblos near reliable sources of water like the Rio Grande River.
What archaeologists call the "Great Drought," however, struck the Southwest in the late 1200s and persisted for more than a quarter century. Extermination Warfare New archaeological evidence reveals that from the late 1200s until the 1500s, the Anasazi were continually at war with one another.
They fought for control of watered farmlands, for access to wild-food resources, and perhaps even over competing religions. These were not just occasional raids, but brutal wars of extermination. There is much evidence of massacres, pueblo burnings, and killings of men, women, and children everywhere in the Anasazi homeland.
For example, in 1263, more than 30 infants and children were burned alive in a kiva of an old reoccupied Great House. The Anasazi built their pueblos in clusters for mutual protection. As the warfare intensified, however, the Anasazi abandoned one pueblo cluster after another.
The refugees moved on to other pueblos, greatly enlarging their populations. Some of these pueblos expanded to a thousand rooms or more. By 1450, only three major pueblo clusters remained in the entire Anasazi homeland. Except for a line of pueblos along the Rio Grande River Valley, the land outside the surviving three clusters was empty of human life. Huge numbers of Anasazi had starved to death or died in the unrelenting violence.
Dr. Damon of the University of Arizona was one of the early tree-ring researchers who first suggested the natives suffered terribly during a great drought and ended up abandoning their civilization as much of the population died.
I used to walk around the desert with him, picking up stuff and marveling at the amazing numbers of pieces of pottery that was strewn about the place near the arroyos and rivers back then. Today, this is all scrubbed clear but when I was a child, the ground was covered with broken pottery. The older pieces were esquisitely beautiful. This was the black and white pottery with fine lines and paintings of animals on them, done with great talent and assurance.
Also, there were grinding stones which I learned to use myself, these tools laid all over the place, just everywhere! I used to run around, picking them up for fun! These stones weren't anywhere near where they originated. They were obviously quite valuable once upon a time, and then suddenly, abandoned.
If the population was high, some child, some young woman would have picked them up and used them! But they were not used at all! Even near Three Corners and all around the base of Kitt Peak, these grinding stones lay! Far from the homes of the tribes that lived there, out in the middle of nowhere, there they were!
Today, the people who descended from the survivors of this catastrophic drought that killed all the trees except for a very few, all get fat very easily for their bodies evolved to harbor fat, to hoard food internally. Generations of starvation made their bodies very efficient, low burners. Now, with excess food and rich sugars and fats, they struggle with diabetes and other woes. Actually, this is true of most of us, for we all are survivors of the Great Ice Ages that hammered humanity and turned us into what we are today.
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