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CleanTechnica reports
The "flash drought" that came out of nowhere this summer in the US High Plains, afflicting Montana and the Dakotas the worst, has already destroyed more than half of this year's wheat crop, going by some recent field surveys. Considering that the region is now one of the top wheat-growing regions in the world, the damage is very notable.
These so-called flash droughts are expected to become considerably more common over the coming decades as the climate continues warming and weather patterns continue changing.
[...] Something that's interesting to note here is that 2011, only 6 years back, was actually one of the wettest years on record in eastern Montana. Those sorts of rapid swings between extreme precipitation and flooding on the one hand, and extreme flash droughts on the other, are only going to become more common from here on out. Eventually, most of the agriculture in the region will have to cease.
Grist calls this a Cereal Killer.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 10 2017, @10:23PM (2 children)
Sorry, but it was quite predictable that the yearly weather would start going into more extreme cycles even before the global warming thing started kicking in. You see, our parents and grand-parents were living during this thing called the "little climatic optimum", characterized by weather that wasn't erratic, and we were have been leaving that since roughly (there aren't any smooth boundaries here, one period grades into another) the start of the 1950's, perhaps a bit sooner. (Note that the dust storms happened *during* the little climatic optimum. Weather is never that reliable. There was also the "year without a summer", which was directly tied into a volcano.)
So even without global warming we should be expecting more erratic weather. This makes it a bit harder to say that any particular event of bad weather is due to global warming...but measurements show it is indeed happening to compound things. When the polar ice pack melts, that's not because of leaving the little climatic optimum, that's because the arctic has gotten warmer. However, weather being weather, and things not be distributed evenly, global warming has also, or appears to have also, lead to episodes of unusually cold weather...of course, usually we can't be sure that any one case isn't due to leaving the little climatic optimum, or even just due to the chaotic nature of weather.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday August 11 2017, @02:41PM
So? The two points I made are still correct, and TFS is still stupid. No one can predict the weather, or the climate. Saying "it's going to change" is both obvious and not helpful. Saying "it's going to change more" may well be true, but doesn't make it any easier to predict the weather or the climate. And there's still no indication whatsoever that agriculture (or ranching) in the area "will have to cease."
TFS, and apparently, TFA as well (I didn't read it, I'm usually in traditionalist mode, especially when TFS is as full of absurdity as this one), are full of fecal matter as to these points.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:06AM
No, that period was around the year 900 AD to 1300 AD. [britannica.com]