NoHumZone

Ah yes, the typical “Dust Bowl” dismissal. Climate alarmists love to ignore the “Dust Bowl.” And that's because they don't actually understand what it was. They just talk out of their ass, which is what you are doing here. The term “Dust Bowl” does not refer to the decade-long drought that spanned North America during the 1930s. It also does not refer to the record-shattering heatwaves that impacted the U.S. and Canada in the 1930s, particularly in the spring and summer of 1930, 1933, 1934, 1936, and autumn of 1939. Rather, the “Dust Bowl” refers to a [relatively] small geographical area that was affected by the most severe dust storms during the 1930s. Specifically, the areas affected were the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, southwestern Kansas, and southeastern Colorado (Lee & Gill, 2015, see the first image). 🔗sciencedirect.com/science/ar… While farming practices (specifically, the plowing of deep-rooted perennial prairie grasses and replacing them with shallow-rooted annual crops like wheat) likely contributed to the incidence of dust storms, the drought and heatwaves were naturally forced, mainly by anomalous tropical Pacific and North Atlantic sea surface temperatures (i.e., La Niña and the +AMO). Only ~30% of the Great Plains land area had been plowed for farming by 1930 (Cunfer, 2005); farmers generally adapted to the Plains landscape rather than changed it. In other words, farmers did not cause the drought or extreme heat in the 1930s, and therefore, it cannot be dismissed as an anomaly. 🔗tamupress.com/book/978158544… Tree ring-based proxy reconstructions also indicate that 1930s-like droughts have occurred in the Great Plains once or twice per century, on average, for at least the last 10,000 years (Herweijer et al., 2007; Miao et al., 2007). The second image shows some of these past droughts that I identified looking through the North American Drought Atlas. 🔗journals.ametsoc.org/view/jo… 🔗eas2.unl.edu/~dloope/pdf/Mia… Many of these historic Plains droughts, including two during the 19th century alone (circa 1818–25 and the 1854–65 “Civil War Drought”), exceed the 1930s in terms of both spatial extent and magnitude, and were comparable in duration (e.g., Muhs & Holliday, 1995; Burnette & Stahle, 2012). Early settlers described the region as a de-facto desert with blowing sand. 🔗sciencedirect.com/science/ar… 🔗link.springer.com/article/10… In 1855, U.S. Army Lieutenant Gouverneur Kembel Warren (known as G. K. Warren), who would later become a general during the American Civil War and crowned the “Hero of Little Round Top,” described the Nebraska Sand Hills as, 🗨️ “The Sand Hills (les Buttes de Sable) present their most characteristic appearance just north of the Calamus river, spread out in every direction to the extreme verge of the horizon. The sand is nearly white, or lightish yellow, and is about three-fourths covered with coarse grass and other plants... The scenery is exceedingly solitary, silent, and desolate, and depressing to one’s spirits.” More accounts suggest that there were similar heat extremes to the 1930s in the Great Plains during the 1820s. James (1823) recounts Stephen Long's journey through southwestern Nebraska’s Imperial and Lincoln counties in June 1820; he noted “extensive districts covered entirely with loose and fine sand” south of the South Platte River. Long also noted that, 🗨️ “The intense reflection of light and heat from the surface of naked sand... added much to the fatigue and suffering of our journey.” 🔗archive.org/details/accounta… Army Fort data from NOAA NCEI's archive also show that many summers during the 1850s and 1860s may have been similar to those of the 1930s. I attached daily weather observations from Manhattan, Kansas from July 1860 in the third image attached below. The high temperature of 115°F recorded on July 9, 1860, is only eclipsed by 116°F measured on August 13, 1936. If you look at the handwritten paper forms for stations across the country in 1860, you'll find many of them reaching 100°F+ multiple times. Richmond, Virginia did. So did Chicago, Illinois (and it's much rarer there). Drought conditions in the 1930s were undoubtedly amplified by positive land surface feedbacks, but those feedbacks were mostly a response to natural devegetation of the landscape from persistent rainfall deficits in the 1920s and 1930s, not mechanized agriculture. The occurrence of similar, if not worse droughts in the Great Plains in past centuries which predate mechanized agriculture only further supports the idea that the 1930s drought was natural, and by extension, the heatwaves, too. Regardless, even if you remove the 1930s from the dataset, the occurrence of extremely hot days in the U.S. and the number of heatwaves have still declined since the 1890s. 🔗link.springer.com/article/10… As for other regions of the globe, there aren't enough data points to reliably reconstruct the same dataset globally back to the 1890s. That's why U.S. data are important, despite the U.S. being a small fraction of global land area. It's because the U.S. has the best climate data record in the world, and the rest is just a guessing game. Throw a dart.