The news yesterday of the Arizona Dust Storm over Phoenix, one of the largest metropolitan areas in America, was stunning.
It demonstrated once again what a crazy year we are having weather wise–with devastating and frequent tornadoes, major flooding, wildfires–and now a massive dust storm at least 50 miles wide and churned by near hurricane force winds!
It also reminds us of the dust storms over the rural Great Plains during the 1930s, which led to mass migration to California as an escape.
Hopefully, this Arizona dust storm is a fluke, but it could also be a forerunner of the future, of shortages of rain leading to many metropolitan areas in the Southwest and the Southeast being subjected to massive dust storms that threaten lives and health of millions of Americans in urban areas, not the comparatively small numbers of people in rural areas, as in the 1930s!
America is certainly starting to see the effects of climate change or global warming, no matter how much the naysayers deny it!