Sydney dust blanket causes highest air pollution on record

[panzerfaust]

Source: Sydney Morning Herald (Oz)





Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/sydney-dust-blanket-causes-highest-air-pollution-on-record-20090923-g1fw.html?autostart=1

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Climate change?

Why, nothing to see here: Move Along

[Selatius]

1. It's difficult to pin one weather event on a macroscopic problem such as climate change.

Climate change is real, but it's next to impossible to lay all the blame on just that one item alone. For thousands of years, there have been dust storms in that region of the world. Where there are deserts, there are usually dust storms.

[AusDem]

3. thats true, however there is no denying that extended

drought increases the likelihood of dust storms. Well, as far as I understand anyway, happy to be schooled either way.

[MrModerate]

2. The proximate cause is apparently farmers prepping their fields for planting . . .

The expectation is that there'll be enough moisture to hold the soil in place after it's been disturbed, but that didn't happen this time. Climate change? Dunno. It's happened before, though.

[fasttense]

4. Looks like the dust bowl of the 1930s in the US.

"The Dust Bowl or the Dirty Thirties was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936 (in some areas until 1940). The phenomenon was caused by severe drought coupled with decades of extensive farming without crop rotation, fallow fields, cover crops and other techniques to prevent erosion. Deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains had killed the natural grasses that normally kept the soil in place and trapped moisture even during periods of drought and high winds."

"During the drought of the 1930s, with no natural anchors to keep the soil in place, it dried, turned to dust, and blew away eastward and southward in large dark clouds. At times the clouds blackened the sky reaching all the way to East Coast cities such as New York and Washington, D.C. Much of the soil ended up deposited in the Atlantic Ocean, carried by prevailing winds which were in part created by the dry and bare soil conditions itself. These immense dust storms–given names such as "Black Blizzards" and "Black Rollers"–often reduced visibility to a few feet (around a meter). The Dust Bowl affected 100,000,000 acres (400,000 km2), centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and adjacent parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. The Dust Bowl was an ecological and human disaster caused by misuse of land and years of sustained drought. Millions of acres of farmland became useless, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes; many of these families (often known as "Okies", since so many came from Oklahoma) traveled to California and other states, where they found economic conditions little better than those they had left. Owning no land, many traveled from farm to farm picking fruit and other crops at starvation wages. Author John Steinbeck later wrote The Grapes of Wrath, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Of Mice and Men about such people."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

[Javaman]

5. shades of things to come. nt