The Dust Bowl was Human Induced Global Warming Too

I mentioned this briefly in a recent post, but climate deniers have been heavily using the Dust Bowl induced heat waves of the 30s as proof that the current high temperatures and North America-wide drought just can't be global warming because it was hotter back then!  Naturally they mostly get this from denialist HQ, Anthony Watts' site (and he does have a post up about how darn hot it was in the 30s, and other denialist sites either link to it, or riff off the same theme that it was hotter in the 30s).  Watts:

The other take-home is that one has to be very careful about attributing the recent extreme temperatures to dreaded global warming. As noted above, there are surprisingly few all-time state records in recent years.

See, as long as the daily temperatures aren't all time highs you just can't call it global warming!

The great flaw in this typically specious reasoning is that the Dust Bowl was itself an example of human induced global warming.  The mechanism wasn't greenhouse gases, but, well, dust.  But our activities (agriculture) changed the surface of North America enough and allowed enough surface soil wind erosion that a natural drought dried the land right out, killed off whatever little plant life remained to hold down the powder dry soil, and the wind did the rest.  It took a few decades of poor mass agricultural practice (no crop rotation, monoculture, no wind breaks) and despite a lower population, and much less technology involved (still lots of manual farming technique back then) we managed to severely modify the climate of certainly North America (if not the whole world, albeit less markedly) for several years.  The Dust Bowl was a major climate event, an unmitigated catastrophe poured on a nation that was already deeply suffering a different sort of malady in the Great Depression.  Now that our "routine" heat waves are even comparable to the Dust Bowl ones should really be cause for concern, not comfort in any sane accounting. 

Luckily for our 1930s predecessors, dust just doesn't stay up in the lower atmosphere that long, and the climate was able to more or less right itself within a decade.  Unfortunately for us, rain doesn't really wash carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere very well, it stays up there a long time.  What exactly is going to end Dust Bowl 2?

As for deniers, it shows the emptiness of their case that to refute human induced climate change today, they cite...human induced climate change of a different sort from the past.