Is history destined to repeat itself?
According to scientists the answer is yes!
I was watching the history channel the yesterday, May 28, 2008. The segment I watched was called Natural Disasters and had to do with the Dust Bowel of the 1930’s. I learned that during the late 1920’s until about 1938 the Midwestern part of the United States underwent a horrific drought and it is from whence that the term Dust Bowel comes. From that documentary, it was stated that certain things in life are cyclical, including certain climatic patterns. To explain that ten year drought, the scientist had to look back hundreds and maybe thousands of years in order to plot a weather graph or chart.
The process by which the weather anomalies are explained is by using pieces of old trees that they get from the region in question. They get a wedge of old tree and read the circles. But instead of counting the lines like they do to measure age, they measure the with of each line in each circle and the distance between one and the other. The bigger the gap between one circle and the other tells them one thing, and the width of each line in the circle tells them another. By measuring these two items, they can pinpoint the weather conditions on any given date in our history. That in and of itself it truly fascinating. But that is not what this blog is about.
This blog is about the extrapolations that were drawn from those findings, namely that the next “dust bowel”, which can occur within the next thirty to fifty years, can last up to 100 years! That is utterly freighting. People will begin to die from various illnesses, not to mention dehydration. Plants will not grow, animals will die food will become scarce or worst, not existent. The following paragraph is form the History Channel’s description of the documentary:
Recent warming trends in seawater and air temperature point to a possible mega drought in the next thirty to fifty years. Could we be facing a replay of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s on an even bigger scale? Scientists working with government authorities are highly cognizant of the need to conserve. Is it too late? Jump ahead to a scenario seventy years into the future–a twelve-year drought has left the country unstable and economically depressed. Cities across the west lie abandoned, states fight over limited water supplies and we are now dependant on other nations for food. Society has devolved into a desperate battle for survival as individuals fight over the scarce resource.
Global warming is affecting our climate in all sorts of ways. The weather fluctuates from one extreme to the next. Tsunami, to much water. Drought not enough water. What happened during the late 1920’s and 1930’s was man made as well. Because of an abundance of rain, the wheat crops were growing rich and yielding a lot of grain. Farmers would not grow it fast enough, the demand was to great. Many farmers became extremely wealthy. They continued to buy up land and plant more wheat. Since wheat was paying more that any of the other crops, the farmers continued to growth wheat. Then the rain stopped. At first they thought is was just a passing phase. But it wasn’t. It took them fours years to realize that they were in a drought because so much wheat was stockpiled from when it was in abundance. Once the rain stopped and the earth started to crumble because it was so dry food started becoming scarce. Even scarcer was water. To make things worst, because of the vast expansion that so many farmers made on their farms for wheat, the was nothing buy sea’s of dry, poor soil. Then the tornadoes came.
It picked up the dry soil or dust, and blew it all over the Midwest. It couldn’t be cleaned fast enough for as soon as it was, more was blown. This drought occurred at the same time that the US was experiencing the stock market crash, or the depression. This is the era that Stienback wrote “Grapes of Wrath.”
Many people reading this will be dead when and if this mega drought were to occur. However, our children and grandchildren will be alive. What kind of planet will they come to know and call home?
