Droughts, sand dunes,
and wells that dry up
There were always a few hardy souls that farmed their sloughs, in the hope that the crops
they put in in the low places wouldn't drown out. Sometimes, maybe in one out of
three years, their gamble paid off, but most of the time the low places were filled with
water in the Spring.. No more. Anyone not working up his sloughs may well miss
putting in his crop in the only place where they'll have any hope of getting enough
moisture to grow anything.
There are even today active sand dunes in Southern Saskatchewan and in Northern Alberta.
Sand dunes are usually found only in deserts, and nobody involved in farming here
needs to be convinced that we live and operate at the verge of desert conditions.6
In addition to presently active sand dunes, Alberta has many areas containing
sand dunes that were most certainly active at times in the not-too-distant past. One
of those is know as the Bruderheim Sand Hills, somewhat overgrown with a thin covering of
grasses and jack pines, beginning just a couple of miles from our farm. A similar
area of sand dunes, now also scarcely overgrown, is an area south-east from the town of
Redwater, a few miles north from the Bruderheim Sand Hills, north of the North
Saskatchewan River.
Ice cores taken from long-term ice deposits such as in Greenland show that
not only snow was deposited then that turned to ice during the last five major ice ages,
but that during each of those ice ages large amounts of dust were deposited as well.
That indicates that during the ice ages there were generally arid conditions
throughout much of the world. If global warming causes arid conditions to end, as
some climatologists posit, please, let us have some more warming, we need rain, not sand
dunes.
Fortunately, what little warming we have had during the recent past did have
some impact on the Sahara Desert. All across the southern expanse of the Sahara
Desert agriculture benefits, and the poor people who were afflicted by the serious drought
conditions that ended about two decades ago now rejoice in being able to reap
substantially more productive crops than they were able to produce then. (See
Africa's deserts are in
"spectacular" retreat, New Scientist, 2002 09 18)
Some of the explorers who examined the Palliser Triangle tried to tell us that drought
conditions are normal for around here. Others produced reports that differed and
claimed that the climate here was ideal for agriculture. That may not have been on
account of ill will. The latter explorers were here when the weather happened to be abnormally wet,
while others where here when it was abnormally dry. They were both
right and each took the worm's-eye view.
From the information observed and collected by the early explorers,
the Canadian Government selected what it liked best and succeeded in convincing hundreds
of thousands of people from all over the world that farming was a very viable enterprise
around here, because of the good weather we have for it. What they didn't tell
people was that the weather made farming possible around here only because it was
abnormally wet at the time.
Of the conflicting opinions, the one that was convenient got picked, not the
more practical one. But what can we expect? It wasn't the first time that
people were conned by a government for the sake of short-term benefits to some interested
parties. In this case it was because a railroad needed to be built, to forge a
nation, sea to sea, so as to prevent British Columbia from seceding to the United States
— and a lot of money was to be made from that, not the least of which was that if
grain could be grown here, then farmers had to be brought in, and money could be made from
that as well. Why hold up progress on account of the weather?
Yes, in the long run, desert conditions in the American Plains were far more often the
norm than the exception during the past 4,000 years, and groundwater levels were often and
for centuries about five to ten meters lower than what they are right now.6 There wasn't much industrialization
in the world for all of the past 4,000 years. Today there is, and we call
normal conditions abnormal and blame them on man's activities, as we
previously blamed undesirable, "abnormal" weather conditions on war or
witches. True and honest science is hard to sell; it is easy to
promote superstitions.
Another study report not only examines the past climatological record
but establishes a firm connection between the variability of the Sun and climatological
changes over time. It even makes the claim that,
Understanding the regularity with which drought has occurred in the past 2000 years
will help greatly in predicting the timing of future droughts in interior North America.
Our data indicate that we are in the middle of the 260-year-long relatively dry period and
suggest that this climate will persist for about another century before the next 130 years
of relatively wet climate.9
Still, there are others who
see the irrefutable evidence that links the sunspot cycle to the cycle
of alternation between drought and above-average precipitation (such as
in the Great Western Plains in the following example) but fail to accept
the evidence because they have, all available evidence to the contrary,
not been able to find "...a plausible explanation based on atmospheric
flow patterns [that] makes the sunspot-drought connection [less] elusive
at this time, although several empirical procedures have appeared in
American and Canadian farm newsletters and almanacs suggesting the use
of sunspot cycles for predicting drought conditions."
Source:
CANADIAN PRAIRIE DROUGHT: A CLIMATOLOGICAL
ASSESSMENT
Prepared by Madhav L. Khandekar
Consulting Meteorologist, for
Alberta Environment, 2004
Perhaps Madhav L. Khandekar made such statements in his
report in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, so as not to appear too politically
incorrect with the people that put his bread and butter on the table and
whom he knows to be fervent advocates of the man-made global warming
religion. Nevertheless, farmers, who truly must depend on the
weather for a living and are not fortunate enough to be able to depend
on incomes derived from tax revenues, must be given credit for not at
all being as dumb as some people insist they are. Farmers know
that something is the truth when it stares them in the face. They
are realists, not sufficiently astute, politically, to always have to
agree with government-sponsored religious doctrine -- tongue firmly in
cheek or not.
The calculations done by General Circulation Models (GCMs) are
the main source of the information that fuels the global warming hysteria.
Nevertheless, not one of them comes acceptably close to accurately calculating
what the climate presently is at any location, let alone of the whole Earth.
Not only that, but all of the GCMs differ widely from one another as to what the
climate was in the past, and as to what it is supposed to be in the future.
Therein lies the problem. No one in his right mind will base any decisions
about the future on tools that cannot determine with acceptable accuracy what
the present is and the past was.
Still it is amazing that someone points to instance
after instance of evidence linking climatic trends to the sunspot cycle
and then stops searching for plausible explanations for that connection,
even though the scientifically acceptable explanations for that are
legion and very easy to find.
The calculations done by General Circulation Models (GCMs) are
the main source of the information that fuels the global warming hysteria.
Nevertheless, not one of them comes acceptably close to accurately calculating
what the climate presently is at any location, let alone of the whole Earth.
Not only that, but all of the GCMs differ widely from one another as to what the
climate was in the past, and as to what it is supposed to be in the future.
Therein lies the problem. No one in his right mind will base any decisions
about the future on tools that cannot determine with acceptable accuracy what
the present is and the past was.
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