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‘Flash drought’ could devastate half the High Plains wheat harvest

It’s peak hurricane season, but the nation’s worst weather disaster right now is raging on the High Plains.

An intense drought has quickly gripped much of the Dakotas and parts of Montana this summer, catching farmers and ranchers off-guard. The multi-agency U.S. Drought Monitor recently upgraded the drought to “exceptional,” its highest severity level, matching the intensity of the California drought at its peak.

The Associated Press says the dry conditions are “laying waste to crops and searing pasture and hay land” in America’s new wheat belt, with some longtime farmers and ranchers calling it the worst of their lifetimes. Unfortunately, this kind of came-out-of-nowhere drought could become a lot less rare in the future.

“The damage and the destruction is just unimaginable,” Montana resident Sarah Swanson told Grist. “It’s unlike anything we’ve seen in decades.”

Rainfall across the affected region has been less than half of normal since late April, when this year’s growing season began. In parts of Montana’s Missouri River basin, which is the drought’s epicenter, rainfall has been less than a quarter of normal — which equals the driest growing season in recorded history for some communities.

“It’s devastating,” says Tanja Fransen, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s office in Glasgow, Montana. Just six years removed from 2011, one of the region’s wettest years on record, eastern Montana is now enduring one of its driest.

“We’re at the bottom of the barrel,” Fransen says. “For many areas, it’s the worst we’ve seen in 100 years.”

In a matter of weeks, the area of Montana in drought conditions has expanded eightfold.U.S. Drought Monitor

Wheat production worries

The drought already has far-reaching effects. In eastern Montana, America’s current-largest wildfire continues to smolder; the 422-square-mile Lodgepole complex fire is one-third the size of Rhode Island. It’s Montana’s largest fire since 1910.

Across the state, 17 other large fires are also spreading. “We haven’t even hit our normal peak fire season yet,” Fransen says.

Recently, as the climate has warmed and crop suitability has shifted, the Dakotas and Montana have surpassed Kansas as the most important wheat-growing region in the country. The High Plains is now a supplier of staple grain for the entire world. According to recent field surveys, more than half of this year’s harvest may already be lost.

The economic impact of the drought and related fires may exceed $1 billion across the multi-state region by the time the rains return. Donations of hay for beleaguered farmers and ranchers have come in from as far away as West Virginia.

Farmers in the region are also worried because the Trump administration has targeted a key federal crop insurance program for hefty cuts. The governors of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana have all declared states of emergency to speed aid and open some normally protected areas for livestock grazing.

Abnormally dry conditions now cover 100 percent of South Dakota.U.S. Drought Monitor

It came out of nowhere

Droughts are often thought of as creeping, slow-motion disasters. They usually don’t grab headlines like hurricane landfalls, even though they represent the costliest weather-related catastrophe worldwide.

But this drought is an anomaly, a “flash drought.” It essentially came from nowhere. It didn’t exist just three months ago.

The frequency of these rapid-onset droughts is expected to increase as the planet warms. A recent study focusing on China found that flash droughts more than doubled in frequency there between 1979 and 2010.

Droughts like these are closely linked to climate change. As temperatures rise, abnormally dry conditions across the western United States are already becoming more common and more intense. And as evaporation rates speed up, rainfall becomes more erratic, and spring snowmelt dries up earlier each year.

Future summers in North Dakota are expected to be even hotter and drier, on par with the present-day weather of south Texas.

Taking heavy losses

On Whitney Klasna’s ranch in Lambert, Montana, the spring rains “just didn’t come this year.” Klasna has already seen 60 to 80 percent crop losses in her fields, and now she’s making calculations about which of her cattle she can afford to save. She and her crew are working to drill an additional water well and install a pipeline to keep as many alive as possible.

Now they’re worried that, if the rains do come, they’ll lead to flash flooding; the ground has essentially been transformed into concrete.

Klasna calls the drought a “perfect storm of bad luck” and expects its impacts to last for years.

The drought in western North Dakota is now just as severe as California’s was at its peak.U.S. Drought Monitor

Further west, near where the Lodgepole complex is burning, Sarah Swanson runs a John Deere dealership, one of the biggest businesses in her community. She hears heartbreaking stories from across the region, with many farmers and ranchers working together to fight the fire with their own equipment.

“Right now, I don’t think anybody has time to feel scared,” Swanson says. “I think the emotions will probably start once they have time to get the fire out in a week or two.”

Last week, Swanson wrote a personal letter to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, a Montana native, asking him to ease grazing restrictions on a nearby wildlife refuge. Two days later, he did so.

“We’ll be able to continue on,” Swanson says. “I wish I could say that for all the Main Street businesses in eastern Montana, but I don’t think I can. The effects are already being felt by restaurants and retail shops and gas stations, and there will be some that can’t sustain this.”

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‘Flash drought’ could devastate half the High Plains wheat harvest

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If You Think Ted Cruz Is Extreme, Wait Till You Meet the Conservative Activists Who Endorse Him

Mother Jones

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Tuesday’s Indiana primary is arguably the final frontier for Ted Cruz to keep alive any prospect of winning the Republican presidential nomination. The poll numbers aren’t looking good for him in the Hoosier State, but he’s holding out hope that Indiana will join several other Midwestern states in rewarding him for his socially conservative record. But in his quest to become the favorite of social conservatives, Cruz has aligned himself with a number of far-right extremists who could cause him trouble in the increasingly unlikely event that he finds himself in a general election battle in November. From the star of Duck Dynasty to activists who advocate executing abortion doctors and gay people, here’s a partial list:

The Benham family: In February, Ted Cruz appointed David and Jason Benham, twin brothers and real estate entrepreneurs based in North Carolina, to his campaign’s Religious Liberty Advisory Council. As Mother Jones reported in April, the brothers have been at the forefront of every battle to oppose gay rights in North Carolina in recent years. They’ve opposed gay pride parades and organized anti-abortion protests, and at one point David Benham equated the battle against marriage equality with fighting Nazis. The brothers were most recently instrumental in stoking opposition to a Charlotte nondiscrimination ordinance that eventually led to HB 2, the state’s transgender “bathroom bill” that has sparked a national uproar.

Their father, Flip Benham, is a well-known anti-gay and anti-abortion street preacher in Charlotte. In November, Cruz touted Benham’s endorsement in a press release. In 1994, Benham became the director of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, and he later renamed it Operation Save America. He still leads the group. Benham is best known for having helped convert Norma McCorvey—the “Jane Roe” of the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion—to fundamentalist Christianity and to renouncing her past support of abortion rights. In 1995, Benham opened the national headquarters of Operation Rescue next door to the Dallas abortion clinic where McCorvey was working at the time as a marketing director. The two struck up a friendship, and when McCorvey eventually converted, Benham performed her baptism.

Troy Newman: After Flip Benham moved and renamed the national Operation Rescue operation, Newman took over its western branch, now based in Wichita, Kansas. In January, Cruz announced his campaign would form a Pro-Lifers for Cruz coalition co-chaired by 10 anti-abortion activists. Newman is one of them. The campaign’s press release announcing the coalition describes Newman as the author of Their Blood Cries Out, a 2000 book in which he wrote that “the United States government has abrogated its responsibility to properly deal with the blood-guilty. This responsibility rightly involves executing convicted murderers, including abortionists, for their crimes.”

Last week, after Cruz appeared to be making a play for more women voters by announcing former Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina as his running mate, executives from several pro-choice groups wrote an open letter to the Cruz campaign encouraging it to fire Newman from Pro-Lifers for Cruz due to his history. “Troy Newman’s history of violent rhetoric and harassment toward women’s health providers is truly beyond the pale,” they wrote.

Kevin Swanson: Cruz was a featured speaker at the National Religious Liberties Conference in Iowa last November. He was introduced by conference organizer Kevin Swanson, a pastor who is known for his belief that gay people should be killed. Right before bringing Cruz to join him onstage, Swanson gave an impassioned speech in which he clarified that gay people should be executed by the government only after they’ve had sufficient time to repent.

“Yes, Leviticus 20:13 calls for the death penalty for homosexuals,” Swanson said, pacing the stage, his voice rising. “Yes, in Romans chapter 1, verse 32, the Apostle Paul does say that homosexuals are worthy of death. His words, not mine! And I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ!” Here’s Swanson’s speech in full:

Cruz’s appearance at the event, along with those of former GOP presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Gov. Bobby Jindal, caused an uproar, but the Cruz campaign made no moves to distance itself from Swanson’s ideology. Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler told the Rachel Maddow Show that Swanson’s call for the execution of gay people was “not explicit.” In December, the campaign changed its tune and told USA Today that it was a mistake for Cruz to attend Swanson’s event.

Tony Perkins: Perkins is the head of the Family Research Council, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has classified as an anti-LGBT hate group, and the chair of Pro-Lifers for Cruz. Early in his career, while working as a reserve police officer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1992, Perkins was suspended from duty after failing to report to his supervisors that an anti-abortion group was planning a violent protest at a local abortion clinic. Perkins had learned this information because he worked part-time for a local conservative TV station, and his camera crew was often outside the clinic, filming confrontations between pro-choice and anti-abortion protesters.

While managing a US Senate campaign in 1996, Perkins paid more than $80,000 to purchase the mailing list of Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. He later gave a speech to the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens, another white supremacist group, in front of a Confederate flag. Under his leadership, the Family Research Council has touted a number of false claims about LGBT people, most famously the idea that gay men are more prone to sexually abuse children. (Many medical groups, including the American Psychological Association, have debunked this claim.)

James Dobson: In February, Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, the largest organization of the religious right in the United States, endorsed Cruz for president in a TV ad and in robocalls to voters.

Focus on the Family has several million subscribers to its monthly magazines and more than 220 million listeners of its various radio broadcasts, which usually feature Dobson. The group has become known for its deep-pocketed opposition to marriage equality measures and candidates across the country who back gay marriage. It also supports the practice of reparative therapy, which aims to “cure” homosexuality, and has continued to do so even after Exodus International, a reparative therapy group it once partnered with, disbanded and disavowed the practice.

Dobson has also made some extreme statements over the years. He blamed the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on the legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage, warned of an impending civil war over gay marriage, and said he opposes the Harry Potter books because they promote a “New Age ideology” to kids.

Phil Robertson: In January, the Cruz campaign put out a video of the candidate duck hunting with Phil Robertson, the star of the A&E show Duck Dynasty, who has come under fire for his anti-gay comments. Robertson has compared homosexuality to bestiality and said AIDS is God’s “penalty” for immorality and gay sex.

In this video from the Cruz campaign, Robertson endorses Cruz, saying, “Ted is my man.” Robertson and Cruz are wearing face paint and hunting gear, shooting rifles into the air.

“I am thrilled to have Phil’s support for our campaign,” Cruz said at the time. In February, Cruz suggested that Robertson would make a good ambassador to the United Nations.

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If You Think Ted Cruz Is Extreme, Wait Till You Meet the Conservative Activists Who Endorse Him

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