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‘The Dust Bowl of 2012’: Drought Covers Majority of U.S. and ‘Might be a $50 Billion Event for the Economy’
Climate Progress / News Analysis
Published: Wednesday 18 July 2012
While it has been hotter than the 1930s in many places in this country, the drought hasn’t been quite as bad as the worst of the original Dust Bowl.
This year’s drought ranks as one of the top 10 worst U.S. droughts for the last century. With more than half the country (54 percent) experiencing drought conditions, it’s the single worst drought since the 1950s.
It is hot all over. NOAA said in its June “State of the Climate Global Analysis”:
This is the second month in a row that the global land temperature was the warmest on record for that month.
While it has been hotter than the 1930s in many places in this country, the drought hasn’t been quite as bad as the worst of the original Dust Bowl. But if we don’t act soon to slash greenhouse gas emissions, we are on our way to far worse as climate change fuels more frequent and more extreme droughts across the U.S. (see “We’re Already Topping Dust Bowl Temps — Imagine What’ll Happen If We Fail To Stop 10°F Warming”).
Climate Progress has documented how unrestrained fossil fuel pollution is leading to worsening droughts. Texas’ severe drought of the past memory was made 20 times more likely from global warming, as one study explained. The Nature article last year, “The Next Dust Bowl,” explained, “warming causes greater evaporation and, once the ground is dry, the Sun’s energy goes into baking the soil.”
Climatologist Jonathan Overpeck at Arizona University told the AP:
This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level. The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about.
This drought is hitting farmers hard — and ranchers, too. As Reuters put it:
Ravaged by fires, Western ranchers face “scary” summer
… recent wildfires in states such as Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming have displaced thousands of cows from federal rangelands which may not be fit for grazing for years. Where range has not been destroyed, drought has lessened forage.
“We’re going to run out of grass. It’s shaping up to be scary,” University of Idaho Extension Agent Rauhn Panting said.
The next to be hit is the American consumer. The Agriculture Department has declared the largest federal disaster zone in its history for 26 states, as corn and grain crops dry up, particularly in the midwest where 63 percent of the midwest has moderate to extreme drought. Corn production shrunk 7 percent in the last week, according to a Reuters poll: “What began the season as a potentially record corn crop as farmers planted the biggest area since 1937, may now be the smallest in at least five years.”
Consumers will feel the drought’s burden through rising food prices:
“For sure, the full effect of this drought will not be until 2013. It’ll be 2013 when we see it and its in the whole supermarket,” Richard Volpe, an economist with the USDA’s Economic Research Service said. ”But if the price of corn shoots up, we’d see this effect within about two to three months. That doesn’t mean we’ll see a complete jump into food prices. It’s just that we should start to see the effects.”
Michael Swanson, agricultural economist at the largest commercial agriculture lender, said:
“It might be a $50 billion event for the economy as it blends into everything over the next four quarters.”
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ABOUT Joe Romm
Joe Romm is a Fellow at American Progress and is the editor of Climate Progress, which New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called "the indispensable blog" and Time magazine named one of the 25 “Best Blogs of 2010.″ In 2009, Rolling Stone put Romm #88 on its list of 100 “people who are reinventing America.” Time named him a “Hero of the Environment″ and “The Web’s most influential climate-change blogger.” Romm was acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy in 1997, where he oversaw $1 billion in R&D, demonstration, and deployment of low-carbon technology. He is a Senior Fellow at American Progress and holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT.
7 comments on "‘The Dust Bowl of 2012’: Drought Covers Majority of U.S. and ‘Might be a $50 Billion Event for the Economy’"
July 21, 2012 9:00am
The farmers are going to pay for their loyalty to the polluter dominated Republicans.
July 18, 2012 1:50pm
John Wesley Powell gave an assessment of the region west of the Mississippi River into what is now Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and Arizona (aka Southwestern US). He stated that this area was not fit for farming. All that was there was thick grasses and very little water were parts of his reports. This flew in the face of the green lush lands Lewis and Clark described of the Northwestern US. Powell stated that specific rules would need to be in place if this area was ever going to be fit to live on. Well these rules were never followed. The prairie was cut up and drought has been a reoccuring theme ever since. This is not to say that droughts never happened before, they did. All the 1st Nations have stories about the years with little rain/snow.
Think about what we are trying to do to this naturally semi-arid region and how it magnifies natural changes in weather patterns. The Agricultral Adjustment Act of 1933 suggested that people stop farming in this region and let the prairie grasses take over. FDR had plans in place to buy these farmers out, pay farmers in this area NOT to farm. Did it do any good? Well with prairie grass over the soil, it keep the Dust Down. It also kept the soil from drying out as much.
We must live sustainably. Finding a way where we can have the comforts of a modern life and not trash the planet is the next tech revolution that will not only help us environmentally, health-wise, but it will kick start our economy. Of course, those in the ruling class cannot allow the masses to benefit in such a total way. So we will keep hearing the same stupidity from the media and from government. We don't need the media harping on what even the IPCC considers to be not a major issue (CO2) as stated in their reports, totally ignorning what are major problems, and government fighting change of any type tooth and nail. Follow the money and who will lose if we do have this new "tech" revolution that makes sustainability the norm.
And the reality is that our climate is changing and will always change regardless if we are here or not. If we are to survive we must adapt.
July 18, 2012 1:03pm
So we have less high-fructose corn syrup and less beef feed... We can do with 70% less corn, prioritizing the arable land to real food. There is a huge buffer there. We'll need it when it comes time, because nothing is going to happen until there is more demand and higher farm profits for staples than for steak and sodas
July 18, 2012 12:20pm
If this is truly the effects of global warming, and I think it probably is, than we will need to do more than reduce CO2 emissions. Even we reduce our use of fossil fuels, the rest of the world would need to also do so. It would be a tough sell, at best, and real leadership would be required. Additionally, I suggest that we need to begin a crash program to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. This can be accomplished by developing a massive program to plant trees. Start with several row on both sides of the national highway system. Take advantage of the millions of acres of government owned lands. Encourage other nations to do the same. We should be prepared to help finance this effort.
But even that will take far too long to achieve the results we need. We should begin a project to move water for irrigation from where it is plentiful to where it is scarce. Water from the Great Lakes could be transported south to the farming areas. The spring flooding of the Mississippi river could be trapped, stored and used to irrigate fields later in the summer. Finally, we need to get going on developing desalienation plants along the west coast, the Gulf coast and the south east coast, where extreme water shortages are about to create problems we are not prepared to handle.
The world is getting hotter and will continue to do so, dispite our best efforts, for many years to come. If our civilization is to survive, we will need to move quickly to deal with the effects of this climate change. Failure to do so will produce not just famine and suffering, it will bring violence and war as nations vie for ever scarcer resources. This time we can not put a quick fix in place but must plan ahead for what we already know is the future. There is no room for failure and no excuses will suffice.
July 18, 2012 12:58pm
I like your spunk, but please, before you run off, please learn about how our dynamic earth's systems are interconnected. Yes, we must find alternative sources of energy, yes we must all cut our energy use back 75-90%. We must live sustainably. But please do not lose your common sense. CO2 is not our biggest "warming" problem. Water, O2, and N2 are the prime warmers.
Irrigation has caused much of our water shortages and made our water problems worse. Moving water from say the Great Lakes to Kansas/Nebraska would be devasting to the Great Lakes States and would only bring more drought to Kansas. Nature brings ground water up to the surface over time, but you need to have ground water for this to happen. Irrigation has depleted the ground water supply in the Central and Southern Great Plains. The answer in the 1930's was to stop all farming in this area. It still is the right answer today.
I do love your idea for trees along highways, bordering farm fields, and so on. The Michigan Boy Scouts did that in the late 80's and early 90's along the divided highways in the state. They are beautiful.
July 18, 2012 11:58am
Get accustom to it.
July 18, 2012 11:58am
We will very likely continue in perpetual and progressively more severe dust-bowls due to global warming if we have strategically located individuals representing major polluters like Senator James Inhofe of OK who thinks global warming is a hoax contrary to the consensus of 97% of climate scientists findings. To change the direction of progressive climate destruction (if possible because some think the tipping point is already passed), we need to bring more intelligent and scientific minded people who UNDERSTAND things other than MONEY/POWER!