Someone mentioned today a scholarly article that was written recently about a horrific drought that took place in the Northern Hemisphere during Medieval times.
I did some searching when I had time and found it. I was quite shocked in reading about its severity. Likely many thousands and possibly millions of lives were lost due to failure of agriculture as well as disease from drinking contaminated water. It serves as a reminder to us all how delicate our ecosystems are when being deprived of water and bombarded with extreme heat.
Technology has created many wonderful advances for society, yet one thing it hasn’t been able of yet to do, is control the weather. Here in the Midwest, we take for granted the abundance of snowfall and rainwater on a yearly basis. When you look at countries around the world as well as States here in the USA, they are dependent on very thin margins or variances of normal rainfall as well as temperatures. Out in western Nebraska, Kansas and parts of Oklahoma, there are years where they have nearly no crops simply because they didn’t receive enough rain. We look at California’s weather patterns these last several years and find a State nearly on red alert in rationing of potable water. I could never understand why there are not more desalinization plants being built to offset the needs of growing populations that live near the ocean.
Someone said a very long time ago that one commodity that will likely create global disorder, is the lack of accessible drinking water. There are third world countries that have mini-fiefdoms built simply on who controls the resource of drinking water.
I hope everyone does a little more reading and investigating on water usage as well as how some so willfully waste water. I think after reading the article that I have attached as a link below, you will all hope we will not be faced with what happened in the year 1540 when the medieval drought arrived.
