Environmental hero Bill McKibbon, writing in an opinion piece for The Guardian, blisters the Trump administration’s recently revealed emails that ban the use of the term “climate change”. The emails reveal that The US Department of Agriculture (USDA), I know, instructed staff to hide the fact that global warming is threatening the food supply from crops to livestock.
At the federal level, the new policy has yet to show clear-cut success either. As the say-no-evil policy has rolled out in the early months of the Trump presidency, it coincided with the onset of a truly dramatic “flash drought” across much of the nation’s wheat belt.
As the Farm Journal website pointed out earlier last week: “Crops in the Dakotas and Montana are baking on an anvil of severe drought and extreme heat, as bone-dry conditions force growers and ranchers to make difficult decisions regarding cattle, corn and wheat.”
In typically negative journalistic fashion, the Farm Journal reported that “abandoned acres, fields with zero emergence, stunted crops, anemic yields, wheat rolled into hay, and early herd culls comprise a tapestry of disaster for many producers”.
Eric Holthaus of Grist reports on the flash drought striking the high plains of the United States where he notes that “It’s peak hurricane season, but the nation’s worst weather disaster right now is raging on the High Plains.” His disturbing story should be read in full but below are some excerpts.
Droughts are often thought of as creeping, slow-motion disasters. They usually don’t grab headlines like hurricane landfalls, even though they represent the costliest weather-related catastrophe worldwide.
But this drought is an anomaly, a “flash drought.” It essentially came from nowhere. It didn’t exist just three months ago.
The frequency of these rapid-onset droughts is expected to increase as the planet warms. A recent study focusing on China found that flash droughts more than doubled in frequency there between 1979 and 2010.
Droughts like these are closely linked to climate change. As temperatures rise, abnormally dry conditions across the western United States are already becoming more common and more intense. And as evaporation rates speed up, rainfall becomes more erratic, and spring snowmelt dries up earlier each year.
Future summers in North Dakota are expected to be even hotter and drier, on par with the present-day weather of south Texas.