A 160-kilometre wide dust storm, corn shrivelling in Georgia fields and Texas blackouts are all harbingers of an unstoppable force geophysicists call “perpetual drought.”At least the terrible Dust Bowl years of the 1930s in North America ended, Dr. Richard Seager told the Toronto Star on Thursday. This one won’t.
The U.S. Drought Monitor computer tracking tags the parched conditions in Texas and Oklahoma as an extraordinary drought, with the rest of the stretch from Arizona to Florida not much better.
Losses in Texas alone, to cattle and wheat, could reach $3 billion U.S., state officials said. Rainfall in Oklahoma is 28 per cent of normal.
In parts of Arizona, it’s half of what it should be. The July 5 dust storm, the worst in 30 years, shut down Phoenix Sky Harbour International Airport and coated the city in a crust of dirt.
All 254 counties of Texas have been declared natural disaster areas. In some place, salt buildup on power lines not swept away by rain has caused blackouts.
“The current drought has been running for less than a year,” said Seager of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. The cyclical arrival of the La Niña weather pattern brought it and will eventually move on.
But more ominous and catastrophic is the permanent spike in temperatures that is making southwestern North American too feeble to bounce back.
“Beyond the year-to-year variability, the entire region from California to the southern plains is getting dryer. It may not be more severe than what we have now, but it will be more persistent,” Seager said.
By the middle of this century, he said, the drought state of the southern United States will be permanent.
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Source: Toronto Star
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