Hi Jeff and WeatherCat drought sufferers,
Southeast Colorado plains are in a similar situation. 5 years of drought. I have heard reports that the grass is actually dying. Keep in mind the grass of the plains evolved with periods of frequent drought. I easily could see the dust bowl starting again.
Alas, your fears are well founded. What is frightening is that soil management has dramatically improved since the 1920s. Supposedly, farmers should be able to cope with very dry conditions. So if we are seeing blowing dust, it means that even our best technology has been overwhelmed.
So sad to see it continue to rain buckets in northern Colorado - only a few hundred miles away. I am not sure El Nino will save the day with climate change throwing wrenches in the climate gears.
Well, there is another monkey-wrench that has been thrown into the water management gears and I fear it is a fundamental challenge to western democracies. Here in California there is a demographic weakness that politicians are exploiting with horrible consequences.
Because of the extreme density of populations in urban areas, effectively California is ruled by the voters in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and so on. The rural areas were food is grown has very few people. That's supposedly a feature - a lot of food is grown without a lot of labor (and associated costs.) However, it means the voice of growers is drowned by the voters in urban areas.
When there is a water shortage, politicians have a choice: make the difficult decisions that may not be popular but are needed to maintain our water supply, or: fight over the available water. For decades, in California and other western states, the solution has been to fight - producing the media slogan:
"water wars."However, that seems to be war turns out to be a subtle mode of the
"tyranny of the majority." If there isn't sufficient water, it is unthinkable to make the urban dwellers suffer from the shortfall. That would be political suicide. Yet, the representatives from agricultural areas can go along with this with a
"wink." Of course they will fight like dogs for the water-rights of their constituents, it is simply that after a hard-fought battle, they will be out-voted by their urban representing colleagues. Since it appears that those representatives are working really hard for the farmer's interests, those representatives from rural areas have a good chance of being reelected - even if they failed. Since a politician isn't interested in policy, but being reelected . . . . . . every politician got what they
really wanted. The fact that California agriculture is being destroyed by water restrictions - its
"okay", so long as the farmers put up with their representatives.
There is subtle but horrible transformation going on in democracies today driven by the increasing focus on winning political campaigns and the associated expertise that goes into a winning campaign team. It is an incredible paradox, but we know infinitely more about how to get a candidate to win an election than we do about how to run a complex society like the United States or Europe. As a result, there is a natural instinct on the part of politicians to stick to what they "know." They don't have any idea of what California's water policy actually should be, but they can figure what they need to do get reelected. One almost cannot fault them for sticking to what they are comfortable with. Alas, what they are doing is wrecking the country and trying very hard to avoid being caught doing it.
Definitely another very sad observation to say the least.
Sincerely, Edouard
