Population flight from growing desert of central Texas « Climate Progress
The state of Texas will be adding four congressional districts due to significant population growth.
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One of the major reasons that there’s such a radical population shift is that central Texas is changing from arid grassland to uninhabitable desert, in part due to greenhouse pollution from the fossil fuels once buried under the ground.
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"Texas was a land known for its repeated dry spells, but it had never seen anything like the drought of the 1950s. From 1950 to 1957, Texas baked under the most severe drought in recorded history. The total rainfall was off by 40%, and excessive high summer temperatures made the situation that much worse. In one year, 1952, Lubbock did not record even a trace of rain for the entire year.
The drought devastated Texas agriculture and greatly affected lakes and reservoirs. For example, Lake Dallas fell to an astounding 11% of capacity."
Source: Texas State Library & State Archives
Wow, it was worse over 50 years ago.
"One of the worst droughts in Texas history occurred in 1884–86, causing most of the farmers to fail and to return to the East. In later years official detailed recordkeeping makes possible a better understanding of the geographical distribution of droughts.
Drought occurs when an area receives, in a given year, less than 75 percent of its average rainfall. The number of drought years in each of ten geographical areas of Texas in the 100 years between 1892 and 1992 was as follows:
Trans-Pecos, sixteen years; lower Rio Grande valley, seventeen; Edwards Plateau, seventeen; South Central, fifteen; Southern, fifteen; North Central, twelve; Upper Coast, thirteen; East Texasqv, ten; High Plains, ten; and Low Rolling Plains, eight.
There has been at least one serious drought in some part of the state every decade of the twentieth century. The most catastrophic one affected every part of the state in the first two thirds of the 1950s. It began in the late spring of 1949 in the lower valley, affected the western portions of the state by fall, and covered nearly all Texas by the summer of 1951. By the end of 1952 the water shortage was critical;..."
Source: Texas State Historical Assn.
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