https://news.yahoo.com/climate-change-makes-repeat-dust-bowl-twice-likely-161445503.html
This should not be surprising to people who have followed the science.
And human activity had started causing an increase in greenhouse gases and average global temperatures before the industrial era, because of activities like using fire for cooking, cutting and burning woods for farmland.
Marlowe HOOD
,AFP•May 18, 2020
Due to global warming, the United States is today more than twice as likely to endure a devastating "dust bowl" scenario than during the Great Depression, researchers said Monday.
Nearly a decade of heatwaves and massive dust storms across the US Great Plains in the 1930s ruined agricultural land and drove tens of thousands of farming families far and wide in search for food and work.
"The 1930s Dust Bowl heatwaves were extremely rare events that we might expect to see occur once in a hundred years," said Tim Cowan, a researcher at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia, and lead author of a study in Nature Climate Change.
"Under today's levels of greenhouse gases, they are more than twice as likely to occur, with their period-of-return reduced to once in around 40 years."
Even in the 1930s, the finger print of global warming was perceptible, although the impact on weather and climate was then extremely small.
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"If extreme heatwaves and drought reduce the vegetation as they did in the 1930s, heatwaves could become even stronger," threatening global food supplies, she said in a statement.
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A study last month in the journal Science concluded that the western United States has likely entered a period of megadrought -- the fourth in 1,200 years -- that could last decades, even a century.
Globally, 19 out of 20 of the warmest years on record have occurred this century.
Average global surface temperatures -- including over oceans -- have increased by about 1.1 degrees Celsius since the pre-industrial era, the standard benchmark for global warming.
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