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"20 Signs America Is Headed For Another Dust Bowl"
by Epic Economist
"Dust bowl conditions are coming back in America. For decades, the U.S. was considered the breadbasket of the world, but those days have come to an end. As weather conditions get drier and drier, the nation's water reservoirs are rapidly drying up and dust bowl conditions are spreading across the country.
Many factors are contributing to this alarming situation. Scientists have been warning that the U.S. water supply is being depleted at an astounding pace, and new estimates indicate that there won’t be enough water to irrigate millions of acres of crops this year. On top of that, millions of Americans will be affected by water restrictions this summer.
Over the past 20 years, drought conditions have become the "new normal" in many areas of the Southwest. In fact, meteorologists say that the wet conditions that we enjoyed from the late 1940s to the end of the 1990s were the exception to the rule and that most of the time the interior west is actually incredibly dry. They are also alerting that the current megadrought is likely to stay with us a lot longer than it did during the 1930s.
As temperatures go up and water supplies go down, our ability to preserve our agricultural production gets dramatically compromised. Without enough water, we cannot grow enough food to feed our entire population, and with global food supplies getting tighter and tighter, we cannot afford to have a significant decrease in agricultural production right now.
The drought that has enveloped southwestern North America for the past 22 years is the region’s driest “megadrought” — defined as a drought lasting two decades or longer — since at least the year 800, according to a UCLA-led study in the journal Nature Climate Change. Thanks to the region’s high temperatures and low precipitation levels from summer 2020 through summer 2021, the current drought has exceeded the severity of a late-1500s megadrought that previously had been identified as the driest such drought in the 1,200 years that the scientists studied. UCLA geographer Park Williams, the study’s lead author, said with dry conditions likely to persist, it would take multiple wet years to remediate their effects.
Unfortunately, many areas of the heartland of America are slowly but surely heading to another climate disaster. History tells us that it is only a matter of time before dust bowl conditions return to America. Over the past few decades, we have counted on irrigation and other technologies to delay the inevitable, but at the end of the day, this cannot be stopped. At this point, we can only hope that the return of dust bowl conditions is put off for as long as possible, but let's also prepare diligently for the worst because unexpected catastrophes can change everything much faster than we can even imagine.
That is why what is happening is so worrying. For that reason, today we compiled several numbers that expose the dire effects of abnormally dry weather conditions in the U.S."
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