Are We Getting a Second Dust Bowl?
How bad this time?
Dust storms are like tornadoes gone sideways.
On Friday, a dark cloud swept across Indiana and Illinois with winds up to 70 mph, on the heels of devastating storms, making it impossible for drivers to see. In Chicago, visibility fell to zero in minutes. Dust storms haven’t menaced the city since the 1930s. You can thank overfarming and overgrazing, which made this year’s soil “some of the driest ever” according to a piece in The New York Times.
Scientists are telling us it’s a rare and ominous event that signals something they’ve been warning us about for years. In fact, climate experts say what just happened qualifies as a haboob, a kind of severe dust storm common in the Middle East, but they’re not normal on the American plains.
It’s interesting how so few Americans know much about the Dust Bowl. They know it happened, and that’s about it. They don’t know why it happened, how bad it was, or if something like that could happen again.
Btw, Americans had no problem wearing masks when people were dying from pneumonia, lungs literally filled with dust. The Red Cross distributed thousands of masks to families in the worst areas.
Kids went to school in this:
Are we heading into another Dust Bowl?
Or something worse?
I found answers.