By Barbara Kessler
If global warming wasn’t so devastatingly tangible, it would sound like part of a doomsday cult. Consider these projections of the future for a swath of the U.S.
First up: Kansas, the American heartland, breadbasket to the world, a place of amber waves of grain…a place we might not recognize by century’s end.
Under projected global warming scenarios, Kansas will become hotter and drier, with more insects and more storms during the next several decades. By century’s end, western Kansas will be so arid, it will need 8 more inches of water to sustain crops there. Eastern Kansas will be wetter, but so warm that evaporation will claim the extra rainfall and southwestern Kansas will be a virtual desert. All this according to a report released last week by University of Kansas scientists Nathaniel Brunsell and Johannes Feddema for the Climate Change and Energy Project based in Salina, Kansas.
But wait, Dorothy, there’s more.
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February 6th, 2008
By Barbara Kessler
As communities in Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and Arkansas sift through damage from deadly tornadoes that tore through last night, another town is quietly commemorating its reconstruction after a belly-punch from Mother Nature last year.
On May 4, 2007, 95 percent of the homes and businesses in Greenburg, Kan., were virtually wiped away by a massive, slow-moving EF5 tornado that scraped a 2-mile-wide path. The result left the already economically depressed town wondering if it would have a future.
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Related Topics: · Greensburg, Kansas, LEED, Tornadoes
