We ain't seen nothin' yet ...

I started watching Ken Burns documentary about "dust bowl" last night, interesting thanks for sharing.

The 'dust bowl' of the thirties was a harbinger of things to come. It was a tragedy of biblical proportions.

"The World Bank has now warned that the temperature increase will be felt the most along the equator in the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of the United States. This temperature increase will lead to scarcity in water and food resources and disruptions in biodiversity - which could force mass migrations of people out of affected areas. Rising temperatures will also lead to rising sea levels which threaten cities located in India, Mexico, and Vietnam - as well as several African nations. Several small islands around the planet will likely be unable to sustain their populations by 2100 as a result of this rapidly warming planet. These threats, caused by our relentless pushing of billions of tons of carbon into our atmosphere every hour, may well be the subject of a future Ken Burns-type documentary - how humans destroyed the planet and themselves in the 20th and 21st centuries. That assumes, though, that the future Burns-style piece will have the same happy ending that Burns' piece on the Dust Bowl did. If not, there won't be a special - there may not even be TV or the civilization that supports it."

"Janet Larsen, Director of Research-Earth Policy Institute, joins Thom Hartmann. This past weekend Thom saw the PBS's new documentary on the Dustbowl of the 1930s - Ken Burns brilliant look at one of the worst man-made ecological disasters in modern times. During the Republican "no regulations" bubble of the 1920s, commodity prices - particularly wheat - were bid up on to the point where thousands of farmers flocked to the Midwest and used mechanized plows to break open tens of millions of acres of virgin prairie land and convert it to fields for growing wheat. The buffalo grass that covered the plains - and the buffalo that both grazed on it and fertilized it - helped hold moisture in the earth and produce a viable layer of topsoil. But when the farmers turned this over and exposed it to the sun, combined with a decade-long period of episodic drought, it turned to dust that was picked up by the wind and destroyed farms and towns, destroying fields and killing livestock and humans alike."