Harris News Service

Professor warns of drought amid warming

By Sarah Kessinger
Harris News Service

LAWRENCE - Don Worster stands with his back to a video screen turned a dark gray from a 1930's photo of billowing clouds of dust.
The University of Kansas history professor looks into the young faces of students seated in the university auditorium.
And he poses the challenge: Kansas recovered from the Dust Bowl, but will it heed the lessons from that environmental disaster?
Kansans today are mining groundwater just as they do with fossil fuels.
By 2020 some two-thirds of the irrigated acreage in Kansas will no longer enjoy a reliable water supply, state officials predict.
"That's a mere 13 years away," warns Worster, KU's Hall distinguished professor of American history.
Seven decades since the "Dirty Thirties" buried farms in silt and scattered topsoil from the Great Plains to the Atlantic, today's signals from nature - the abundant evidence of climate change - should be spurring dialogue and action among Kansans, Worster said.
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International scientists predict potential long-term drought and economic fall-out in a region now consuming water far beyond sustainability.
Meanwhile, Kansas seeks to burn more and more fossil fuels that contribute to global warming.
Human and economic loss
In the early part of the 20th Century, dust storms swept through the High Plains, blocking daylight as they carried away precious layers of earth. The ecological nightmare came after years of plowing up fragile grassland to reap the economic benefit of wheat crops, Worster said in his recent speech, "Feeling the Heat: Global warming and the Great Plains."
Today, the state's pursuit of wealth through coal-fired electricity poses a similar problem, he contends. Tons of carbon dioxide releases from power plants are contributing to global warming.
His words echoed what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a multi-national panel of scientists, announced in April.
North America will face more severe storms with human and economic loss, the report states.
It can expect more hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves and wildfires, it said. Coasts will give way to rising sea levels.
Notable in Midwest farm country, the short-term expectations are for crop yield increases of 5 percent to 20 percent from a longer growing season.
But that will quickly decline, if temperatures rise by 7.2 degrees late in the century, the IPCC concludes.
'Matter of faith'
It has been 70 years since the Dust Bowl's temperatures rose as high as 120 degrees some days. Worster wonders whether Kansans in 70 years will see the same.
"If these climate predictions are right, we're going to see a hotter, drier climate without a water source," Worster said. "We've used it up."
He recalled a conversation with a member of the state's board of agriculture a few years back.
The elder farmer's approach to intensive irrigation, which has taken a heavy toll on Kansas water supplies, was one of complacency, Worster said.
" 'So what? My kids don't want to be here anyway,' " the man told him.
"Many realize their children won't be here to farm," Worster said, "so why worry about a resource that's not going to be here?"
But Kansans could change course, he added. Worster senses people are waking up and perhaps will change course.
The governor's office has talked of convening a Midwest conference on the issues of water and climate, he said.
Worster himself is willing to hit the speaker's trail and address groups across the state about the issue.
"We have to assume this is a mining mentality. The old coalmine towns, they disappeared. But some were remade though American ingenuity. Aspen, Colorado, is a former mining town."
What will happen to Kansas' signature places, its small farming towns, he said, is up to Kansans today.
"This comes down to a matter of faith ... in human rationality," he said. "People are pretty innovative, creating a pretty good life on a very difficult planet."
"I hope we're in the part that steps up to deal with it."
Home on the range?
"Most of us in Kansas think it won't be a problem for us," Worster adds. "Maybe in the Netherlands or Bangladesh ... but not here in the 'Garden of the World' as we once called ourselves."
Higher temperatures mean less soil moisture as the evaporation rate picks up. When large-scale irrigation ends, the Great Plains could shift back to dry prairie or to dryland farms, which won't draw the same level of income, Worster said.
The IPCC's report indicates that central North America could see temperature changes that are higher than the global mean. Drought is predicted to center in a spot over the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles.
On the report's map, drought emanates throughout Kansas, Worster notes.
"Those were the conditions of the Dust Bowl days of the '30s."
Farming practices and soil conservation have changed since then. But water depletion has vastly increased.
"Pursuit of wealth has made us aggressive sodbusters, but also aggressive miners of natural resources," Worster warns. "The consumption has made us one of the most economically vulnerable regions in the United States."
It also has social implications.
The "get it while you can" approach, Worster said, "makes us less concerned about our neighbors or future generations."
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Worster is general editor of the Cambridge University monograph series "Studies in Environment and History." His most recent book, "A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell" (Oxford University Press, 2001), won the Byron Caldwell Smith Award. His other books include "Rivers of Empire" (1985), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; the Bancroft Prize-winning "Dust Bowl" (1979); and "Nature's Economy" (1994, second edition.)