And FDR Didn't Do a Thing About It

FuturePundit informs us that Long Droughts Were Common in American Great Plains Holocene Era:

A team of Duke University researchers led by Jim Clark looking at core drillings found repeated dust bowl periods during "the mid-Holocene period of 5,000 to 8,000 years ago in parts of the Dakotas, Montana and western Minnesota."

PORTLAND, ORE. – Events like the great Dust Bowl of the 1930s, immortalized in "The Grapes of Wrath" and remembered as a transforming event for millions of Americans, were regular parts of much-earlier cycles of droughts followed by recoveries in the region, according to new studies by a multi-institutional research team led by Duke University.

Some of those prehistoric droughts in the northern Great Plains of what is now the United States also lasted longer than modern-day dry spells such as the 1930s Dust Bowl decade, according to sediment core studies by the team.

The group's evidence implies these ancient droughts persisted for up to several decades each....

Too many people believe that whatever weather one has seen in one's own lifetime is "normal". When weather suddenly veers from the pattern one has become accustomed to there is a human tendency to look for some exceptional cause such as human intervention. While human intervention may well be changing the climate, the climate is not stable to begin with. We should expect large climate changes as natural.

Even the 1930s drought was not unique in modern times with the 1890s having gone through a drought period as well....

The regularity of these ancient droughts make much more recent Great Plains droughts in the 1890s and 1930s appear "unremarkable" by comparison....

...Whether or not humans reduce their emissions of green house gases, sooner or later the Earth is going to go through some large regional and eventually even global climate shifts....

However, not all the natural changes lying in our future will come to pass. At some point humans are going to start intervening to prevent some changes while perhaps in other cases humans will engineer other desired changes....

But it will happen because the parties with a stake in the outcome (e.g., agribusiness and food processing) make the necessary investments in research and technology, not because FDR's spiritual successors impose yet another government program on taxpayers.