Worried About Refugees? Just Wait Until We Dust-Bowlify Mexico and Central America

During the U.S. Dust-Bowl era, some 3.5 million people fled the region.  As I noted in “The Next Dust Bowl,” a 2011 Nature article reviewing the literature, “Human adaptation to prolonged, extreme drought is difficult or impossible.  Historically, the primary adaptation to dust-bowlification has been abandonment; the very word ‘desert’ comes from the Latin desertum for ‘an abandoned place’.”

But what scientists tell us we are doing to our climate will be much worse than the Dust Bowl of the 1930 — worse even than medieval U.S. droughts.  Indeed, Lisa Graumlich, Dean of the University of Washington’s College of the Environment, notes that the Southwest drought from 1100-1300, “makes the Dust Bowl look like a picnic.”

Remember, the Dust Bowl itself was mostly contained to the 1930s, whereas multiple studies project that future Dust Bowls will be so-called “mega-droughts” that last for many decades — “at least 30 to 35 years,” according to NASA.  Further, the 1930s Dust Bowl was regionally localized.  As the NASA map above makes clear, we are on track to Dust-Bowlify much of the U.S. breadbasket and Southwest, and virtually all of Mexico and Central America.

Other recent research makes clear we would also turn large parts of the Amazon, Europe, and Africa into near-permanent dustbowls.  And this would be “irreversible” on a timescale of centuries.

Read more at Worried About Refugees?  Just Wait Until We Dust-Bowlify Mexico and Central America