Loaded with good ammo for people fighting statism.

I did some research on dust storms for another web site and discovered the extraordinary truth: The 1930s suffered from a thousand-year drought. It was almost certainly caused by a seriously nasty El Nino that didn’t permit ANY moisture to get inland for years.

This is really new science, discovered this decade. Scientists checked ice core samples in glaciers and Arctic ice. They also checked sequences of tree rings in live trees and the remains of trees buried for centuries. They discovered that NO drought of this magnitude happened to the Great Plains since the Vikings were sacking villages in Europe.

Pioneers did stir up some dust with their farming, and did experience normal droughts before and after the 1930s, but nothing on the scale of the Dust Bowl. Ocean currents bat storm systems around like cats with mice.

Humans have little or no effect on temporary fluctuations in climate. Neither global warming nor Dust Bowl blame games turned out to be true.

http://www.helium.com/items/1332339-how-do-dust-storms-form

Here’s a sample:

“The rain stayed away, month after month, year after year, kept out as I said above by the dust storms themselves. The “black blizzards” reflected sunlight back into space. No evaporation could take place, hence no clouds could form. When conditions are right, dust storms feed on themselves. They absorb heat and remain dry. What had been set off, perhaps, by lack of erosion control, had become self-generating, and would not ease until prevailing weather patterns shifted in the 1940s.

“Historians had assumed for years that the dust storms started and grew worse as a result of the growth of farming in land that had formerly been grassland. They thought what had happened in the Middle East was happening all over again in America. As a result of straight line plowing before planting and after harvesting, heavy topsoil no longer could stay in place in strong prairie winds. The prairie grass that used to do the job was gone. Farmers had yet to learn good soil management practices. They simply had assumed that practices that worked well enough back East would work fine out West.

“However, puzzled researchers in the field of historical meteorology recently noted that the drought in the Great Plaines in the 1950s stayed in the South and didn’t spread north, unlike the one during the Dust Bowl years. These dry cycles occur roughly every 20 years on the Great Plaines. They also noted that the Fifties drought wasn’t nearly as severe and didn’t last for years with little or no rain. None of the other previous and subsequent droughts noted in records in that region suffered from the same widespread devastation, either. They were much more similar to the drought of the 1950s. What was so special about the 1930s? Could all that horror really been nature’s response merely to poor farming practices? If so, one would think that the same kind of devastation would’ve hit the Great Plaines earlier, say around the turn of the century. But it didn’t.”