Opinion
Yellow Bird: Global warming may be changing planet


"The Badlands near the Montana border are beautiful this time of the year, but as in most of the western part of the state, it's very dry. Unfortunately, the roads in the Badlands are gravel and kick up so much dust, you can get lost in it.

Crossing the state as often I do, I have begun to seriously wonder about the predictions of global warming. Is the dryness just a local phase or a direction of total change for the planet?

As I came around a Badlands butte, I saw a weathered old sign that read �Poker Jim cemetery.� It's a little cemetery with just locals buried there. You can see the headstones because the grass isn't very high; not enough rain, I guess.

That old cemetery always reminds me how changeable our weather can be. Even though our society has sophisticated weather instruments at its fingertips, we can't always predict the weather. A thunderstorm can turn into tornado winds, or rain can turn into 2 inches of ice. In the western part of the state, the unexpected seems to be normal."

Get the Story:
DORREEN YELLOW BIRD COLUMN: Drought brings musings of warming (The Grand Forks Herald 9/20)
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