Are Dust Storms the New Hurricanes?

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The weather you might typically associate with Fargo, North Dakota, is whiteout-level snow blowing across an empty, frozen landscape, perhaps with a bleak Carter Burwell soundtrack. Dust storms are more of a Dune thing. But last week, Fargo, along with stretches of the rest of the Dakotas, Minnesota and Montana, spent days blanketed in vast dust clouds, kicked up by winds gusting to 70 miles per hour. Some of these turned into swirling “dirtnados,” another fun new weather term we get to learn these days, like firenado and flash drought. The storms caused traffic pileups, ground business to a halt and turned spring allergy season into something far more harmful, with many places subject to “danger to life” air-quality warnings from the Weather Service. Such events are normal in desert regions like 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 across the country in the past 15 years, according to Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data. And their effects can spread for thousands of miles, like the New Mexico storm last year that caused “blood rain” (those fun weather terms again) to fall as far away as North Carolina. Much of the increase in airborne dust, especially in the Southwest, is due to human activity, Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at Columbia University, told me. Housing developments, farming, cattle ranching and off-road driving in arid places like fast-growing Arizona are breaking up vegetation and soil and creating a bunch of powdery dirt. But climate change plays a role, too. Much of the Western US has been in a more or less perpetual state of drought during this century. Water helps soil stick together, and its absence makes soil vulnerable to wind erosion. This ramps up the risk of what scientists like Cook call “dust emissions,” which include not just dust storms and powerful haboobs but also blowing 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 catastrophe by shoddy agricultural practices that fostered dry, loose topsoil. The lack of moist soil on the ground meant less summer heat got absorbed, leading to brutal heat waves that are still some of the hottest on record. That heat led to still more drought and dust, et cetera, et cetera, until you’re Tom Joad. Today’s dust storms aren’t feeding a Great Depression, but they are some of the costliest climate disasters. Dust emissions and wind erosion inflict economic damage of $154.4 billion a year in the US alone, according to a 2025 study in the journal Nature Sustainability by scientists at the University of Texas at El Paso, George Mason University and the Agriculture Department. That estimate makes these phenomena more expensive than floods, wildfires, droughts, winter storms and severe thunderstorms and puts them on par with the most destructive hurricane seasons. The study’s estimate quadrupled earlier ones, but the researchers still called it “conservative,” saying they had found effects that earlier studies had overlooked. Like the fine dust they carry, these storms get into everything, causing traffic accidents, grounding airplanes, ruining crops, damaging homes and businesses and making solar panels and wind turbines less effective. But the costliest effect is how airborne dust attacks human bodies. The tiny particles worsen asthma and other breathing problems, including a dust-storm-specific ailment known as haboob lung syndrome, which can quickly debilitate healthy people. It contributes to heart disease, low birth weights and other deadly health conditions. Dust clouds carry toxins and microplastics. These clouds also carry diseases such as meningitis and valley fever, a miserable fungal infection that has risen in frequency along with the heat and dust. And you don’t have to go on a cruise to catch hantavirus; just breathing a bunch of dirt kicked up in a rodent habitat in the Southwest will do. The hotter the planet gets, the more these risks will rise along with their human and economic costs. We may never get another nationwide Dust Bowl, but the world will be an increasingly dusty and dangerous place. Agricultural practices that did a better job conserving soil helped end the Dust Bowl, but they still haven’t been universally adopted. Soil erosion costs the Corn Belt $2.8 billion a year in lost productivity, according to a 2021 study in the Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences. Adding vegetation and water-capturing features to land and building wind breaks around open fields will help. Of course, we could also stop using planet-heating fossil fuels and eating so much beef, the cattle for which are gobbling up a lot of precious ground cover while burping heat-trapping methane. But these are far heavier political lifts in this c