Rough Winter Ahead?

Is there a rough winter ahead of us?  That depends a lot on where you are.

Mongolia herders, for instance, are having a very tough time this winter. It’s cold, plummeting down as low as –58F, and there is not enough forage for the livestock to make it through the winter, because last year’s summer rains were insufficient to grow enough grass and hay to get livestock through the winter.  The four-leggers are literally dropping in their tracks, partly due to dehydration and loss of forage, and partly due to the bitter cold weather. So the International Red Cross is providing food for the yurt dwellers, while other people from the steppes are moving into cities to get through the winter.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mongolia-weather/mongolias-nomad-herders-facing-winter-disaster-as-temperatures-plunge-idUSKBN14C0HP

From the article:  Government officials have yet to declare a “dzud”, but the current climate is ideal for the natural disaster, said Lamjav Oyunjargal, the director for forecasting at the Information and Research Institute of Meteorology, Hydrology and Environment.

“Officially, conditions are very difficult in Mongolia. Mostly we talk about livestock because it’s the main income of herder people in Mongolia, but it’s also dangerous for humans,” Oyunjargal said.

Dulaamsuren, who works at the National Emergency Management Agency in Bulgan province in remote northern Mongolia, said more than 3,000 local herders did not have enough supplies to last through the winter.

“We have enough hay until February or March, but we really should stock up more,” he said, adding that the region was now under 40 centimetres (11 inches) of snow, four times the usual level. – article

This is not the first time this has happened. It is a fact of life in Mongolia for the herders, who depend on their livestock for everything. But there have been several episodes of this in a row, and if the history of that area is really examined, it is quite a common occurrence for a dzud (dry summer followed by a severe winter) to occur. Drought in the summer should alert the herders that winter will be more harsh than usual. They’ve had several in a row since 2010. The likelihood that this is unusual is low, because the inhabitants of those areas have been there for millennia, and should know the weather cycles quite well. Complacency is not a good quality. They seem to be in a prolonged period of severe summer drought, which reduces grass crops that livestock depend on to get through winter. No rain, grass won’t grow more than it has to in order to survive. May not even form seed heads to replace forage that did not sprout in the spring.

As extreme winters are common, stocking supplies is paramount. As it is, IRC has released some funding to supply the needs of about 3,000 herders, but that is insufficient,  per this article:  https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/12/red-cross-releases-funds-to-mongolia-at-risk-of-extreme-winter

Here’s another link to an article with several photos showing the IRC delivering supplies to the herder families.  https://media.ifrc.org/ifrc/2021/01/21/mongolian-extreme-winter-season-dzud-pictures/

Since these people, whose ancestors for centuries roamed the plains of Mongolia with their livestock, still depend on their livestock for everything, setting aside enough supplies for a rough winter after a rough summer season is a lesson to everyone, not just the Mongols. Several years of bad summers followed by equally damaging winters ought to be a lesson to anyone who depends on livestock or hunting for everything from food to clothing. It also applies to an agrarian area: last summer’s weather was fairly calm in many areas, but that can change quickly.

The years of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s aren’t all that long ago, caused partly by a lack of monsoonal air flow out of the Gulf of Mexico into the Plains states, causing a severe drought, and partly by bad farming practices. And yes, it can happen again, although there are enough irrigation methods available now to moderate that possibility. It wasn’t more than a couple of years ago when the Corps of Engineers had to fortify the shores of Lake Michigan, which has water levels that have varied from 26 inches lower than today to upwards of 45 inches higher than now. They were also called on to bolster and in some places raise, the levees on the Mississippi River a few years ago, in order to keep the southward flow of water from all Ole Man River’s sources from overwhelming the Corps of Engineers’ levees and banks and flooding farmlands the way it did in 1993. There have been several years when floods broke dams and wiped out thousands of acres of good cropland, so it isn’t something new.

In fact, none of it is new: it’s just weather, which we can’t control any more than we can control which way the wind blows. So that money-grubbing scam labeled the Paris Climate Accord wants the current administration to kowtow and fork over some cash, for something that is nothing but a scam. And the current pomp & circumstance crowd are only to eager to do it. A closer look at the reality of warm periods versus cold periods, when glaciers ruled the planet and megafauna were the dominant critters, tells us that this 18,000 year period of warmth may be coming to an end. They howl about CO2 and how it is such a threat, when, in FACT,  CO2, which is 0.04% of the gases in the atmosphere has a spectral absorption band that allows it to retain a certain amount of heat in the atmosphere, and that may be the only thing that is staving off the next ice sheet build-up. 

The Sun is dormant, has been since 2006 when it burped, sent out a massive flare, and then shut down. Sunspot counts are low or nothing, and sunspots are indicative of an active sun. Volcanoes erupting didn’t stop humans from moving on. There was plenty of migration to other places long before settlements were built, following herds and driving mammoths off of cliffs – that sort of thing. But that was about 18,000 years ago, when the last ice sheets were beginning to melt back and following the herds of four-leggers was the order of the day.  There are other factors that enter into this, but during the emergence of this current warm period, people began to build settlements like a village being excavated in southwest Jordan.  Humans went from being the so-called hunter-gatherers to farming, herding livestock and domesticating plants, goats. cattle, dogs (and cats) and other critters for food and clothing. Somewhere along the way, beer was invented when wheat was soaked in water to soften it for making bread.  But all good things come to an end at some point, and this period of warmth and plenty, in which civilization was fortunate enough to grow and expand, may be ending. Throwing tax money at something that is nothing but a scam, when it could be used for better purposes, is not going to stave off anything at all.

 

 

 

 

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