"Dust-Bowlification" putting global food security at risk

[wtmusic]

"Which impact of anthropogenic global warming will harm the most people in the coming decades? I believe that the answer is extended or permanent drought over large parts of currently habitable or arable land — a drastic change in climate that will threaten food security and may be irreversible over centuries.

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The idea wasn’t new. As far back as 1990, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York projected that severe to extreme drought in the United States, then occurring every 20 years or so, could become an every-other-year phenom- enon by mid-century.

Events are starting to bear out these worrying predictions. Snowpack reduction, early snowmelt and a decrease in dry-season river flow in the American West, forecast more than two decades ago, have now been measured. In much of the northern Rockies, the peak of the annual stream runoff is up to three or four weeks earlier than it was half a century ago. Heat and drought — coupled with the greater impact of destruc- tive species, such as bark beetles, aided by warming — have increased forest die-off and the risk of wildfire."

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/issue/

[Name removed]

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[wtmusic]

2. Whew, guess we dodged that bullet.

Texas Could See More Dust Storms as Record Drought Continues

LUBBOCK, Texas – The towering wall of billowing red dust roaring across the blue West Texas sky took Monroe Debusk back more than eight decades to the Dust Bowl years when he was growing up on his family's cotton farm.

The 90-year-old farmer looked out his window Monday and saw the sky darken as a rare 1.5-mile-tall, 250-mile-long dust cloud stretched across the rain-starved land and blotted out the sun.

"I didn't do anything -- just thought back to the way it used to be," Debusk said, recalling the massive dust storms that overwhelmed the region in the 1930s. "That's the way they were."

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/10/22/texas-could-see-more-dust-storms-as-record-drought-continues/

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[wtmusic]

4. Did you read the article?

The thirties will be nothing in comparison to what's coming.

"During the last Dust Bowl era, hundreds of thousands of American families fled the impacted regions. Now, those same type of arid conditions could stretch all the way from Kansas to California within the next forty years.

Prolonged drought will strike around the globe, but it is surprising to many that it would hit the US heartland so strongly and so soon."

[pscot]

5. As long as the Ogallala aquifer holds out

The difference today is irrigation.

[hatrack]

6. Unfortunately for High Plains irrigation, the Ogalalla is far from uniform

It feathers out in New Mexico and the Texas panhandle, and is already commercially extinct (so to speak) in parts of some west Kansas counties.

Where it's deepest is where the soil is worst - parts of it are 700+ feet in depth in Nebraska, but directly beneath the sandhills, where you can't do much of anything except graze some cattle (or buffalo) or hunt ducks in the area's marshes.

[pscot]

7. Gee, that sounds like it would be a good place

to put a big oil pipeline

[txlibdem]

8. Didn't Boone Pickens buy up rights to make a water pipeline from the Ogalalla?

There'll be another pipeline in the works... to bring the water to Texas.