Here’s a weird thing.  Big changes are coming.  We know that they’re coming; we’ve been watching the buildup for decades.  It’ll be big and wide with lots of moving parts. In this post, I’m just looking at one possibility that scares me, both for what it might become, and how we’ll act if it does happen. Imagine if there was a new Dust Bowl. 

President Donald Trump, under his avatar as the demon of moral corruption, is giving us the worst possible example. Now, I’m not expecting we’ll stop the disaster before it hits.  Not that the Republicans aren’t bad, but America as a whole isn’t good at planning for the future. That’s not us.  I don’t even think we’ll slow it down.  I just hope that when the climate does get bad – as we know it will – that Americans can become the good people we should be, and not follow Trump’s corrupting example.

Yes, this is about climate change, but I’ll be quick.  We already know the planet is getting warmer.  Government studies show the global average is up around 0.8°C.  The total amount is uncertain, but the rise is a fact.  How much more we’ll heat up is within a range of uncertainty, but we’ve given up on limiting the change to 1.5° Celsius.  Some people are hoping to keep the rise under or at least near 2°C, which is unrealistically optimistic, but for this discussion, go with 2°C.

None of this is scientifically ‘contested.’  (Well, other than my keeping the rise down to 2°C.) Our best estimate is that we’re trapping heat, and the average temperature will continue to rise.

What that means on the ground depends on where you are.  For this post, I’m talking about America.  The U.S. coasts will get hotter and wetter.  The heartland will get hotter and drier.  The desert southwest will much hotter and… well, contemplate the ‘desert’ part of that description. Again, we know all of this already.

Who’s most at risk?  We’ve known for well more than a century that the arid, desert southwest didn’t receive enough water to support large populations.  They’re deserts; this isn’t a stretch.  Many cities prospered by pumping water up from old, deep aquifers.  That works in the short term, but when you pump out more water than nature replaces, water levels drop.

We could survive in the desert by using less water.  If we did it carefully, we could probably preserve our luxurious living standards.  We’d have to change, but I think we could work it out.  We haven’t been doing that yet, though, pushing most significant changes off to the future.  The aquifers are still dropping.

I’m not going to explore how we might adapt because I don’t see us doing it.  We’re not great at planning ahead.  So imagine the “Brexit no-deal” version instead.  That’s the scenario where we don’t do any preparation and only react after problems become critical.

Here’s the first step: the groundwater in some populated areas runs out, at least part of the year. What’ll we do? Buy more water from the surrounding areas.  That will accelerate their decline.  Water values will rise, driving down property values.  As with the recent housing disaster, we know how dropping home prices will play out. As more mortgages slide (figuratively) underwater, loan defaults will increase.  Rising defaults will pull resources (primarily insurance pools) away from other uses, raising rates and accelerating the regional decline.  Businesses that use the most water will be the first forced to relocate.  Taxes will drop just as demand grows.  (No surprise; that’s how it works.) Fewer new industries will open in regions with higher risk.  More people will lose their livelihood, but, unable to leave gracefully, are forced to default.  Economic losses accelerate.

Now add climate change: the southwest gets more heat and less water.  We’re already seeing renewed dust storms. If we were at the ecological edge before, climate changes move us all in the wrong direction. I think the people living in the American deserts are at the most risk.

Where next?  At 2°C overall, the Midwest will get hotter, if not as bad as the southwest, with less rain overall and more, longer dry periods.  Speaking of dust storms, does anyone remember what happened the last time we saw that kind of long-term weather change?  We called it the Dust Bowl, and it wasn’t a good time.  Sure, the Dust Bowl was exacerbated by weekend farmers (a wheat price bubble, new gasoline engines, and one-way plows that pulverized the surface were a bad mix), but a big part was the multi-year drought.  It didn’t rain much, year after year.  We’re smarter about farming now – modern agricultural practices are dramatically better at erosion control and water retention – but it’s still an arid region.  There’s only so much you can do if there isn’t water.

I live on one of the coasts. Maybe it’s just me, but I have a tendency to shrug at climate change. It’s not crushing my state or my economy, nor many people I know.  The coastal regions will see higher temperatures, more rain, more flooding, and fiercer storms.  That’s not great, but outside of possibly Florida, I don’t see an existential threat. Even with crowding and traffic, I think the coasts will remain attractive.

Then other people started to point me to the bigger picture.  Different areas will see different results. When the trickle of internal refugees begins to flood, arriving poor and needy, I wonder how we’ll react.

No, that was a fib. I have a remarkably good idea of how we’ll react to seeing caravans of poor, scared, desperate people asking us for help.

The last time we saw substantial internal refugees, we made up a new word for them: “Oakies.” And in case anyone forgot, the Oakies weren’t universally welcomed.  It tore our country into combating regions.

Now imagine a new dust bowl, but this time make the dusty swath bigger, running from Iowa to California.  And while I don’t mean to minimize rural suffering, we’re not looking at sparsely populated farms: the big population centers are at the highest risk this time.  Phoenix alone has more than 1.6 million people.  If some larger percentage leaves, that’s a gigantic refugee problem. What will happen if Phoenix (or Tuscon, or Albuquerque) become uninhabitable? I know I’m speculating, and these cities may survive, unperturbed. I surely hope so. But the climate changes we already expect will put populations at risk that could dwarf the depression-era Dust Bowl.

So imagine hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, who need help and support.  Are we prepared?  Not all of us. If I look to the Republican party, their primary focus has been cutting the social safety net. The GOP is not poised to embrace the poor and destitute. Our current administration instead chose to torture the people legally applying for asylum.  It should be harder for Americans to argue in support of kid-cages. And it’s not just one or two of us; the GOP backs the misery, even as their campaign donors urge less compassion.  President Donald Trump and his appointees seem happily willing to break laws and customs if it blocks more people who scare them.

What will we do for our fellow Americans in need?  Since we’re talking about our own people, we should be better than foreign refugees. And they’ll mostly be white people, which apparently (and humiliatingly) makes a difference to our government. So maybe the American President will react compassionately when poor and unemployed internal refugees move out of the affected regions? Do you believe we do the right thing when our citizens ask us for help?

I don’t have to guess what Donald Trump might do, or the modern Republican party of Mitch McConnell, Steve King, and Louie Gohmert. These are the people who ‘responded’ to Hurricanes Katrina and Maria with anything from sullen indifference to raging hysteria. I don’t see them as the center of rational, fact-based analysis and careful governance.

The modern GOP spent decades creating fictional demons.  It’s what got them in power, and what holds them there now. Will they paint the new Oakies as drug dealers, criminals, and rapists?  There’s a Trumpian tradition for it. Will Republicans describe their migrations in scary military or medical terms? (“An invasion infecting our communities…”)  I can see conservative Senators and Representatives opining on ‘personal responsibility.’  Who will be the first to suggest that those American citizens who are trying to leave dry states are both undeserving and inherently different from the rest of us?  (“You know; those people?  You just can’t trust them.”)  How do you think they’ll treat the inevitable ethnically segregated communities that form in adopted cities?

I don’t think we should despair. We can make future climate change better (or much worse), but we can’t avoid the results of our past. We’re responsible for what we’ve done so far.  Even if Trump and his corrupt GOP were voted out of office next week and replaced by the strongest pro-climate politicians ever seen, the past damage would remain.  This isn’t a reason to give up.  We’ve already found that the changes we make (either way) are more effective than we’d predicted.

We’re already surviving the rise in dust storms. If we need people to relocate, we can deal with that. I have the same answer for questions of employment, shortages, and the changes we’ll have to make. There’s nothing that’s impossible.  With careful planning and adaptation, we could manage the changes sensibly. We haven’t been dependably smart about similar changes recently (ref: Detroit or Flint).  Still, it’s possible to do better if we plan ahead, and if we don’t fall for xenophobia preached at us by the rich and threatened.