New research provides solution for the 'Dust Bowl paradox' | Hacker News Reader

New research provides solution for the 'Dust Bowl paradox'

phys.org

37 pointspseudolus7 comments

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.

> I wonder how much the dust bowl played a part in making California the agricultural powerhouse it is today

Definitely this played a massive factor, the documentary of Ken Burns is fascinating and insightful

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/ken-b...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYOmjQO_UMw

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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