My guess is the accurate measuring is only 20 years max and the rest is as you say, inferred........
As a side story, back around 2002 I spent the first night of a pheasant hunting trip to N.W. Kansas in an upstairs room of a 94 year old lady in Logan KS.
She was born and raised there and the house she lived in had been built by her father outside of town and she recalled how once a week they would take their horse and buggy into town to purchase supplies. The well they had at their house was drilled by her father using the method of the times, a drilling post pulled around and around by mule.
Eventually her father had the house moved into town by mule train, with the house being rolled on logs..........
The main street in town is so wide, that people park their vehicles in the middle of it. The reason it was so wide was because when the town was first founded, all the lumber was brought into town on mule trains and the street had to be so wide so as to allow them to turn around.
Anyway, this lovely woman was a literal history book of those times but what was most captivating was her account of living thru the great dust bowl of the 1930's......(There's still evidence out there of the old, abandoned small houses dotting the countryside of people who abandoned them and left)
The reason I bring up the dust bowl in this climate thread is that if you do a search on it, almost every article you find will classify it as the "Greatest man made climate catastrophe of all time"...........
Total BS! The catastrophe was caused by three years of drought and the farmer's inability to grow crops that would have helped to prevent soil erosion and dust storms..........
So the articles imply it was the fault of the farmers........
Great story, local color.
I’ve heard that the Dust Bowl was mostly weather, but that plowing and farming land where rainfall fluctuated from year to year left the land vulnerable. A dry wind blowing over desiccated plowed land is going to pick up and move dirt, creating those dust storms. If the land hadn’t been farmed, there’d be tangled thatched weeds and grass holding the soil together (but of course, no food production).
Before I met her, my wife was in the Sahara during a dust storm, really a full blown sandstorm, which she described as intense, amazing, and awful. There, of course, the drought is perpetual, and the exposed soil and sand gets picked up by the wind. No one thinks much about it, except to blame subsistence farming at the periphery of the desert for extending it (possibly true to some extent due to local overpopulation).
If people want to call what occurred in Oklahoma “man-caused”, they’re partly right because of the poor soil protection techniques, but the ones who do so are saying it as if its somehow unique to modern times. Any time you have a multi-year drought without soil-protecting farm practice, you’ll eventually get consequences. It has nothing to do with world wide industrialization and CO2 generation from fuel usage.
That said, I’m really glad you put me onto Ed Berry’s web site.