
New research provides solution for the 'Dust Bowl paradox' - pseudolus
https://phys.org/news/2020-09-solution-bowl-paradox.html
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yalogin
This is quite interesting. The explanation was quite simple and wonderful
even. For what it’s worth, I never thought of a drought as causing the
rainfall to be evenly spaced throughout the year but technically it’s true.

On a tangential note, I wonder how much the dust bowl played a part in making
California the agricultural powerhouse it is today.

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fakedang
Or an agricultural disaster, which way you look at it.

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ethanbond
Which way of looking at it makes it look like a disaster? Only way I can think
of is in terms of the rest of the country's dependence on it, but I'm no
agriculture expert.

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fakedang
You do realize that California's pursuit of agricultural production is largely
fuelled by a massive expenditure of its water resources right?

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ethanbond
Yes but is this a problem that is actually alleviated by having this farming
elsewhere, or is this just farming at California scale takes an enormous
amount of water?

Certainly there’s some “non-ideal” water intensive farming (eg cotton in
Arizona) but I don’t have a good sense for how much water expenditure is
actually wasteful/where else we’d grow it.

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fakedang
It's most certainly the latter, California isn't designed to handle as high a
load for the extreme hot weather.

Growing cotton in Arizona is plain madness. This year, Arizona was hotter than
Saudi Arabia during summer.

Honestly, I don't see how the US can dig itself out of this one. The Chinese
circumvented this problem by reducing the agrarian population significantly
while acquiring massive land tracts in Africa for cultivation, but the US will
be bound by the farming lobby.

Perhaps government incentives to shift water utilization to newer
technologies, instead of effectively subsidizing agriculture, might help.

