Global Warming

[Bo D]

Inexpensive common sense measures not expensive mostly ineffective measures.  I do believe the people realized what they had done wrong too.

assistance may have reached $1 billion (in 1930s dollars) by the end of the drought (Warrick et al., 1980).
http://drought.unl.edu/DroughtBasics/DustBowl/EconomicsoftheDustBowl.aspx

$1,000,000,000.00 in 1930 had the same buying power as $13,549,360,465.12 in 2014.http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm

$13 Billion!

Pfft ... pocket change 

[me]

Inexpensive?????


four million acres of land had been purchased by the government during the Dust Bowl and permanently restored as national grasslands, the soil didn't blow as much. http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/legacy/

Yeah ... cheap!

The Resettlement Administration (RA), which eventually became the Farm Security Administration (FSA), stressed "rural rehabilitation" efforts to improve the lifestyle of sharecroppers, tenants, and very poor landowning farmers, and a program to purchase submarginal land owned by poor farmers and resettle them in group farms on land more suitable for efficient farming. The Soil Conservation Service (SCS) encouraged cultivation techniques which would prevent further soil erosion. Finally, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) restricted production by paying farmers to reduce crop area. The farmers were paid subsidies by the federal government for leaving some of their fields unused. http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/151818/

That didn't cost anything!

in 1935, FDR initiated the Prairie States Forestry Project to create a "shelter belt" from the Texas Panhandle to the Canadian border. Over the course of the next seven years, the U.S Forestry Service, working in conjunction with the CCC, the newly established Works Progress Administration (WPA), and local farmers, planted nearly 220 million trees, creating over 18,000 miles of windbreaks on some 30,000 farms. The scale of this effort boggles the imagination. http://www.rooseveltinstitute.org/new-roosevelt/fdr-and-new-deal-response-environmental-catastrophe

Pennies!

Agricultural subsidy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An agricultural subsidy is a governmental subsidy paid to farmers and agribusinesses to supplement their income, manage the supply of agricultural commodities, and influence the cost and supply of such commodities. Examples of such commodities include; wheat, feed grains (grain used as fodder, such as maize or corn, sorghum, barley, and oats), cotton, milk, rice, peanuts, sugar, tobacco, oilseeds such as soybeans, and meat products such as beef, pork, and lamb and mutton. Such subsidies are extremely controversial, both because of their complex effects and because of their political origins, which involve heavy lobbying from groups representing the interests of agribusiness.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_States

[Exterminator]

Because the GOVERNMENT stepped in with several unpopular, but very effective measures.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

[Exterminator]

Agricultural subsidy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An agricultural subsidy is a governmental subsidy paid to farmers and agribusinesses to supplement their income, manage the supply of agricultural commodities, and influence the cost and supply of such commodities. Examples of such commodities include; wheat, feed grains (grain used as fodder, such as maize or corn, sorghum, barley, and oats), cotton, milk, rice, peanuts, sugar, tobacco, oilseeds such as soybeans, and meat products such as beef, pork, and lamb and mutton. Such subsidies are extremely controversial, both because of their complex effects and because of their political origins, which involve heavy lobbying from groups representing the interests of agribusiness.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_States

Not sure what this has to do with the money that was spent to re-claim the grasslands and prevent this from happening in the future but it is interesting to note that Joni "we lived within our means" Ernst's family received $460,000.00 in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009.

[Bo D]

Not sure what this has to do with the money that was spent to re-claim the grasslands and prevent this from happening in the future but it is interesting to note that Joni "we lived within our means" Ernst's family received $460,000.00 in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009.

Poor thing. Half a million dollars will barely buy a decent Lamborghini these days.

[me]

Not sure what this has to do with the money that was spent to re-claim the grasslands and prevent this from happening in the future but it is interesting to note that Joni "we lived within our means" Ernst's family received $460,000.00 in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009.

So what?  That was her family and they were as entitled to it as anyone else.   

[Palehorse]

I refuse to waste one more minute of my valuable time on this earth, trying to explain anything more to those who would not believe that they were on fire while their heads were consumed by same. . .

Fry suckers. . . 

[libby]

Sometimes there are no words, at least not for those who deny that, no matter what the cause or effect, global warming/climate change is real and  glub, glub .... 

From today's Washington Post:

An Arctic ice cap's shockingly rapid slide into the sea

By Joby Warrick January 23, 2013

Caption: Heavily crevassed terminus of Kapp Mohn outlet glacier, Austfonna, in May 2013, after 25-fold increase in flow speed (Dunse et al., The Cryosphere Discussions, 2014). Credit: Thorben Dunse, University of Oslo

For years, scientists have documented the rapid retreat of Arctic ice, from melting glaciers in Greenland to shrinking snow cover in far northern Eurasia. Now researchers have discovered one Arctic ice cap that appears to be literally sliding into the sea.

Ice is disappearing at a truly astonishing rate in Austfonna, an expanse of frozen rock far north of the Arctic Circle in Norway's Svalbard island chain. Just since 2012, a portion of the ice cap covering the island has thinned by a whopping 160 feet, according to an analysis of satellite measurements by a team led by researchers at Britain's University of Leeds.

Put another way, the ice cap's vertical expanse dropped in two years by a distance equivalent to the height of a 16-story building. As another comparison, consider that scientists were recently alarmed to discover that one of Western Antarctica's ice sheets was losing vertical height at a rate of 30 feet a year.

"It is a very large signal," said Mal McMillan, a geophysicist and one of two researchers at Leeds' Center for Polar Observation and Modelling who worked on the study. "The ice cap has slumped out into the ocean with a substantial loss of ice."

McMillan and colleague Andrew Shepherd analyzed changes in Austfonna's ice using data from satellites that measure, among other things, changes in elevation. They found that the gradual melting of the island's 1,550-cubic-mile ice cap recently shifted into overdrive, for reasons that aren't fully understood. Small ice caps like the one over Austfonna are believed to be more vulnerable to climate change-related thawing because relatively more surface area is exposed to the air and sea.

The image shows the rate of ice cap elevation change between 2010 and 2014 observed by the CryoSat satellite, which is overlaid onto an image acquired by the Sentinel-1A satellite. Red regions show where the ice surface has lowered due to ice loss. Credit: CPOM/GRL
In this case, the ice cap lost one-sixth of its original thickness in two years, and the flow of ice from the summit to the sea accelerated by 25 fold, to a rate of several kilometers a year, a fast clip by glacier standards, the study found.

"What we see here is unusual because it ... appears to have started when ice began to thin and accelerate at the coast," Shepherd said.

The research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, illustrates how quickly ice caps can evolve, highlighting the challenges associated with predicting future impact of climate change, the scientists said. Arctic experts are closely watching changes in polar ice because of the potentially profound implications for sea-level rise. About a third of the increase in sea level in recent decades is attributed to melting glaciers and ice sheets, and researchers worry that more rapid melting could eventually swamp coastal cities around the world.

Still, researchers say, it's too early to say definitively if the shrinking of the Austfonna ice cap is due to global warming. Ice caps can shift suddenly for reasons that have nothing to do with climate, McMillan said. But in this case the list of possible culprits would certainly include warmer ocean water and air temperatures, both of which have risen more rapidly in the Arctic compared to the rest of the planet, he said.

"We've only seen this for a couple of years," he said of the Austfonna meltdown, "so we really need to monitor it further."

Joby Warrick joined the Post's national staff in 1996. He has covered national security, intelligence and the Middle East, and currently writes about the environment.

If you'd like to see the pictures for yourself, go here:

www.washingtonpost.com  (page A2)

[The Troll]

 
  What are the super rich people going to do when their multi-million dollar beach homes are under 40 feet of salt water.   

[Exterminator]

So what?  That was her family and they were as entitled to it as anyone else.

So what you're saying is that entitlement is fine for rural white people but not for urban blacks.  Do you understand that these subsidies are most often used to pay farmers to NOT grow crops (read: they're paying them to NOT work)?

[me]

So what you're saying is that entitlement is fine for rural white people but not for urban blacks.  Do you understand that these subsidies are most often used to pay farmers to NOT grow crops (read: they're paying them to NOT work)?

Urban people don't have farms dumb ass.  I understand fully what those subsidies are for and why the small farmer doesn't qualify any longer.  Has nothing to do with race.

[Exterminator]

Urban people don't have farms dumb ass.  I understand fully what those subsidies are for and why the small farmer doesn't qualify any longer.  Has nothing to do with race.

Welfare is welfare.

[me]

Welfare is welfare.

[me]

[Bo D]

You see ... this is the very reason you and your ilk don't even have an elementary understanding of the science. Weather and Climate Change are two entirely different phenomena.