'Global weirding' besieges Texas

The wind in West Texas is famously powerful and incessant. But more big blows than anyone can remember have roared through this year, stripping away precious topsoil and carrying off another season of hope for farmers and ranchers. Everywhere, it seems, the land is on the move: sand building up in corners of the just-swept front porch and coating clean laundry on the line, dust up your nose and in crevices of farm machinery. Drive along unpaved county roads and the farmers' plight becomes clear: Wind rakes the surface, scouring sand into adjacent fields, sweeping into deeply tilled furrows. These clogged fields are said to be "blown out," and some belong to Matt Farmer. He grows cotton and peanuts, or would like to, but the sand, he says, keeps "ooching and ooching" into his fields. In a normal year, his wheat crop would be about knee high. This is not a normal year; the anemic stalks barely rise above the heel of Farmer's dusty boots. The wind, the dust and the hair-crackling dryness are ubiquitous reminders of persistent drought gripping the Great Basin, a broad dry swath tracing much the same outline as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. It's part of the "new normal" that climate scientists talk about: the climate of extremes. April was such a month, with tornadoes wheeling across seven states, monumental flooding of the Mississippi River through the Midwest and the South and a searing drought in parts of the western plains. " 'Global weirding' is the best way to describe what we are seeing," said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. "... What's happening is our rainfall patterns are shifting. In some places it means more heavy rainfall, in some places it means more drought, in some places it means both."...more