Tag: Climate Change

“The province of Saskatchewan experienced extreme hardship during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Grasshoppers, hail and drought destroyed millions of acres of wheat. The drought caused massive crop failures, and Saskatchewan became known as a dust bowl.

The term “Dirty Thirties” described the prairies, creating pessimistic perceptions and negative stereotypes about life in Saskatchewan.

In 1928, the net FARMING income was $363 million; by 1933, it dropped to $11 million; and by 1937, two-thirds of the farm population of Saskatchewan was destitute.

Relief costs for the Saskatchewan government escalated to $62 million, which was higher than its total revenues. At least 250,000 people left the prairie provinces between 1931 and 1941.”

http://esask.uregina.ca/entry/great_depression.html

Time magazine, June 24, 1974:

As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

Telltale signs are everywhere—from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data.

Even more from the Wayback Machine:

When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.