Year 3, Month 8, Day 19: Arkansas Traveler Meets Rocky Raccoon.

The Black Hills Pioneer (SD) reprints Gene Lyons’ piece on his cows:

Of all the ways nature has to kill you, drought may be the cruelest. The desiccation proceeds day after punishing day. The afternoon sun pounds the earth like a brazen hammer. As I write, the temperature here in Perry County, Ark., has reached 108 degrees.

The countryside is dying. There’s nothing green in my pastures except inedible weeds. Even pigweed is drooping. Our pond dried up six weeks ago. The ground beneath is bare and cracked. Up on the ridge, some hardwoods are shedding leaves and going dormant; oaks are simply dying.

When I’d turned my cows into their new pasture last year, they kicked up their heels and frolicked like calves. So much fresh grass! Last week, they tore down a low-hanging limb from the persimmon tree they rest under most afternoons. They herded in and stripped the leathery leaves within an hour, the first green thing they’d eaten in weeks.

Lucky cows. Mine is basically a hobby farm, so I can afford to keep my small herd intact. Because spring came a month early, I had enough hay left over to see them through the summer. Neighbors who operate close to the margin have hauled thousands of cows to the sale barn — animals they’d planned on breeding. Pastures stand barren and empty throughout the region.

The National Weather Service calls it an “exceptional drought.” Nobody I talk to can remember anything like it. 1980 was bad, but the devastation was more limited in scope. What’s happening in Arkansas is taking place across the entire middle of the country — a remorseless, slow-motion catastrophe.

As of 8 pm on August 8, there were no comments. This will see blogspace 11 days from now, on the 19th. I wonder what the ratio of denialists to sane people will be by then?

It’s too bad Gene Lyons’ cows don’t watch FOX News or listen to conservative talk radio. They’d surely feel better on learning that their dessicated Arkansas pasture is an isolated anomaly and a liberal hoax. Seriously, don’t you think the few remaining climate-change denialists in politics and the media must be getting a little uneasy? They’re still trying to reject the science of global warming while the entire country is setting new records for heat and drought, and those pesky climatologists keep coming up with more corroborative evidence.

And the environment just isn’t cooperating with the denialist message anymore. When a freak snowstorm fell on Washington, DC, James Inhofe, the self-proclaimed “number one enemy of the Earth, built an igloo with a sign on top, mocking Al Gore. It’s pretty hard to do that when you’re on your third consecutive week of hundred-degree-and-higher temperatures.

This is what climate experts have been predicting for decades would be the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect. Now, as their forecasts are coming true with disturbing frequency, the anti-science zealots are still hard at it, hoping to persuade us that there’s nothing to worry about.

Mr. Lyons’ cows know better. So should we.

Warren Senders

Published.