Because of factors most likely related to the Great Climate Change Hoax, which is enabling greedy scientists to build diamond-encrusted swimming pools filled with Dom Perignon, and to buy very long straws with which to drink it, Iowa is turning to dust these days, and people there have noticed....

"This one is worse than '88," State Climatologist Harry Hillaker said Monday. "You would have to go back to 1936 to find a drought worse than this one," he said. Hillaker said the month of July, which is shaping up to be the third warmest and fifth driest in 140 years, pushed this year's drought ahead of the '88 drought, which has been the misery standard for most Iowans alive today. Iowa's worst recorded drought in 1936 was also fueled by a torrid July, the hottest and second-driest in 140 years, Hillaker said.

Hillaker's hearkening back to 1872, which was a terrible year for rainfall on the Great Plains generally. Texas found itself with huge cracks opening in the earth that, among other things, swallowed up cattle. (And people down there are drawing the comparisons, too.) It was the second year of a two-year drought that, in 1871, almost certainly contributed to the severity not only of the Great Chicago Fire, but also to a massive conflagration that broke out almost simultaneously in the forests of northern Wisconsin, in and around the lumber town of Peshtigo, in which upwards of 2400 people died. At its most basic, Peshtigo was an environmental catastrophe brought on by reckless overlogging and the casual disregard for worker safety that was the hallmark of Gilded Age capitalism. Just sayin'.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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