Are dust storms the new hurricanes? | Today's news

(Bloomberg Opinion) — The weather you usually associate with Fargo, North Dakota is white-out snow blowing across an empty, frozen landscape, perhaps with a somber Carter Burwell soundtrack. Dust storms are more of a Dune thing.

But last week, Fargo, along with parts of the rest of the Dakotas, Minnesota and Montana, spent days shrouded in huge clouds of dust kicked up by 70 mph winds. Some of them turned into swirling “dirtnados,” another fun new weather term we’re learning these days, like firenado and flash drought. The storms caused traffic jams, shut down roads and turned the spring allergy season into something much more damaging, with many places subject to a “life threatening” air quality warning from the National Weather Service.

Such events are normal in desert areas such as California’s Coachella Valley, where dust storms disrupted its famous music festival last month. But they’ve been increasing in frequency and size in recent years, more than doubling in the Southwest between 1990 and 2011 and doubling nationwide in the past 15 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And their effects can extend thousands of miles, like last year’s storm in New Mexico that sent “blood rain” (those fun weather terms again) as far as North Carolina.

Much of the increase in airborne dust, particularly in the Southwest, is human-caused, Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at Columbia University, told me. Residential development, farming, ranching, and off-road driving in arid places like fast-growing Arizona break up vegetation and soil, creating piles of dusty dirt.

But climate change also plays its role. Much of the western US has been in a more or less permanent state of drought during this century. Water helps soil hold together, and its absence makes soil susceptible to wind erosion. This increases the risk of what scientists like Cook call “dust emissions,” which include not only dust storms and heavy haboobs, but also airborne dust and dust haze.

The most infamous example of this was the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, when a natural drought was turned into a disaster by poor agricultural practices that promoted dry, loose topsoil. The lack of moist soil on earth meant less summer heat was absorbed, leading to brutal heat waves that are still some of the hottest on record. That heat led to even more dryness and dust, and so on and so forth until you become Tom Joad.

Today’s dust storms are not fueling the Great Depression, but they are among the costliest climate disasters. Dust emissions and wind erosion cause economic damage of $154.4 billion annually in the US alone, according to a 2025 study in the journal Nature Sustainability by scientists from the University of Texas at El Paso, George Mason University and the Department of Agriculture. This estimate makes these events costlier than floods, wildfires, droughts, winter storms and severe thunderstorms, and puts them on par with the most destructive hurricane season.

The study’s estimate quadrupled earlier estimates, but the researchers still called it “conservative” because they found effects that earlier studies had missed. Like the fine dust they carry, these storms get into everything, causing traffic accidents, grounding planes, destroying crops, damaging homes and businesses, and reducing the efficiency of solar panels and wind turbines.

But the most expensive effect is how the flying dust attacks human bodies. The fine particles aggravate asthma and other respiratory problems, including a dust storm-specific disease known as haboob lung syndrome, which can quickly debilitate healthy people. It contributes to heart disease, low birth weight and other deadly health conditions. Dust clouds carry toxins and microplastics.

These clouds also carry diseases like meningitis and valley fever, a wretched fungal infection that increases in frequency with the heat and dust. And you don’t have to go on a cruise to catch hantavirus; just breathe a pile of dirt kicked up in a rodent in the southwest.

The more the planet warms, the more these risks will grow, along with their human and economic costs. We may never get another nationwide Dust Bowl, but the world will continue to be a dustier and more dangerous place.

Agricultural practices that better protected the soil helped end the dust bowl, but were still not widely adopted. According to a 2021 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, soil erosion costs the Corn Belt $2.8 billion annually in lost productivity. Adding vegetation and water trapping features to land and building windbreaks around open fields will help.

Of course, we could also stop using planet-warming fossil fuels and eat so much beef that cattle gobble up lots of precious soil while belching heat-trapping methane. But those are much harder political lifts in this country than good old-fashioned sensible land management. “Climate change” is still an intangible concept for some people. Dirtynado is about as tangible as it gets.