(End of the American Dream)—Absolutely gigantic dust storms are “triggering massive highway pileups” in the middle of the country, virtually the entire Southwest is currently experiencing at least some level of drought, and dust storms and soil erosion are now costing our economy more than 100 billion dollars every year.
If you think that what we are witnessing is “normal”, you simply are not being rational. The same conditions that prevailed during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s are returning, and scientists have warned us that the megadrought that has now begun could continue for a long time to come.
Last month, a “series of enormous dust storms” caused a tremendous amount of chaos throughout the middle portion of the nation…
A series of enormous dust storms swept the plains states last week, triggering massive highway pileups, a spike in emergency room visits, and “dirty rain” a thousand miles away.
The storms were driven by winds in excess of 70 mph across a vast stretch of dry fields and prairie from New Mexico and western Texas.
In Kansas, at least 55 vehicles were involved in one particular highway pileup, and eight people ended up dying…
At least eight people died after more than 55 vehicles were involved in a crash due to a dust storm in Kansas, authorities said Saturday.
At 3:22 p.m. local time on Friday, high winds moved into northwest Kansas from Colorado, causing a severe dust storm, leading to traffic to slow due to near-zero visibility, resulting in multiple crashes on I-70.
Eight people died in the interstate pile-up, and numerous injuries were reported, the Kansas Highway Patrol said Saturday.
There were also vehicle pileups and traffic fatalities in Texas…
In Texas, four people were killed in car crashes around the city of Amarillo caused by a dust storm on Friday, according to the state’s public safety department.
One of the deaths happened after three lorries collided with four other vehicles in Palmer County, Bovina’s fire chief Cesar Marquez said. Another occurred after a pile-up of an estimated 38 cars.
“It’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” public safety department sergeant Cindy Barkley said, calling the near-zero visibility a nightmare.
Please read that last sentence again.
This is something that I keep hearing over and over. Nobody has ever seen it this bad.
As far north as Wisconsin, people were being warned to stay inside during the dust storms that suddenly erupted last month…
In their wake, air quality readings spiked well beyond levels deemed hazardous by the Environmental Protection Agency. Public health officials warned millions of people as far away as Wisconsin to stay indoors as the dust swept through.
“I’ve never been hit in the face with a shovel, but I imagine it feels something like this,” said a social media user in New Mexico who was diagnosed with dust pneumonia after visiting the hospital.
When the dust is so bad that it makes you feel like you have “been hit in the face with a shovel”, that is a sign that Dust Bowl conditions have returned to your community.
Let’s just be real honest here. Everything is not going to be okay, and the Southwest just keeps on getting even drier.
According to one report, the state of Texas “has struggled mightily in the rainfall department” so far in 2025…
Since the start of 2025, Texas has struggled mightily in the rainfall department. With the exception of the Piney Woods and parts of Southeast Texas near Houston, it has been a very, very dry start to the year.
If current trends continue, it won’t be too long before many areas of the state simply start running out of water…
Texas officials fear the state is gravely close to running out of water.
Towns and cities could be on a path toward a severe shortage of water by 2030, data compiled in the state’s 2022 water plan by the Texas Water Development Board indicates.
Despite all of our advanced technology, we just can’t defeat a megadrought.
Farther north, water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead have dropped to extremely low levels once again…
“Combined storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead is down 691 [thousand-acre-feet] from this time last year, with storage at 33 percent of capacity.”
The lakes provide water to tens of millions of people across the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, support agricultural operations, and generate hydroelectric power.
Earlier estimates suggested Lake Mead would begin 2025 below the 1,075 foot level that triggers mandatory conservation measures under federal drought contingency plans.
This has become a recurring theme.
We are highly dependent on Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and if they keep going dry we are going to have a major crisis on our hands.
A decade ago, scientists tried to warn us that this would be coming…
Here in the American southwest, droughts have become something to expect, but a new study warns that the southwest and central plains could face a megadrought later this century unlike anything seen for millennia.
“(It could be) as bad as the 1930s Dust Bowl, but lasting for 35 years,” study co-author Toby Ault of Cornell told an audience of reporters at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where the results were announced Thursday.
The megadrought that they were warning about is now here.
In fact, we are being told that since the year 2000 conditions in the western half of North America “have been slightly drier on average than a similar megadrought in the late 1500s”…
The latest climate data show that the years since 2000 in western North America — from Montana to California to northern Mexico — have been slightly drier on average than a similar megadrought in the late 1500s.
Williams shared his findings with the Los Angeles Times, providing an update to his widely cited 2022 study, which he co-authored with scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
Let that sink in.
What we are experiencing now is even worse than the megadrought of the 1500s.
If this megadrought persists, the Dust Bowl conditions in the middle of the country will only intensify.
So if you think that the dust storms are bad now, just wait, because you haven’t seen anything yet.
Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
