by Andrea Widburg at americanthinker.com
A “perfect storm” occurs when disparate disasters happen simultaneously, with each pushing the other to greater heights of destruction. We’re currently seeing a perfect storm in America as the Biden administration’s economic policies crash headlong into the effects of El Niño in all its fury.
As a native Californian who always looked forward to El Niño years because they ended California’s cyclical droughts, I pay a lot of attention to this weather phenomenon. Its effects, while salutary when it comes to California’s droughts, are also disastrous, as California’s floods attest.
El Niño is a cyclically occurring warming phase in the Pacific. It has nothing to do with anthropogenic climate change (“It is believed that El Niño has occurred for thousands of years”), and its effects are always dramatic. In some places, it leads to increased cyclones. In America, it can trigger increased precipitation along the Gulf Coast and the West Coast, while bringing droughts elsewhere.
The most obvious effect of weather disruption is crop disruption, and that’s exactly what’s happening in America. According to a South Dakota news outlet, the winter wheat crop in Kansas, one of America’s major food-producing states, is in trouble:
Spring is typically a good time for rain on winter wheat. However, intense drought conditions in western Kansas continue to hurt winter wheat.
Less than 20 percent of Kansas winter wheat is in good to excellent condition. The U.S. Drought Monitor says only 15 percent of Kansas’ acres are not experiencing any level of drought stress. More than 36 percent of the state reported D4 exceptional drought compared to just a little over one percent last year. D3 extreme drought conditions are hurting 16 percent of the state, with D2 severe drought hitting 13 percent of Kansas.
The same is true across large swaths of America, as reported in a grimly named survivalist site, “The Economic Collapse.” That site has collated news stories reporting wheat crop failures and minimal plantings across the United States. Even in California, where there’s no drought, the volume of water is drowning the fields, making planting impossible.
It’s not just crops, though. The same site points out that we’re at our lowest number of beef cows in America since 1962. In 1960, by the way, the census showed that America had almost half of today’s population.
Just to pile on the stressors, remember that climate change madness and Biden’s war are decreasing food production across the world, thanks to rising fuel prices, unsustainable crop practices, and government land seizures to decrease “nitrogen emissions.” (See, e.g., Germany, Sri Lanka, and Holland.)