The Driest March in 131 Years

Robert Hunziker

 May 4, 2026

FacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail

Image by Wesley Tingey.

This article is based upon an analysis of a climate change black swan event currently spreading across America.

As of April 28th, the U.S. Drought Monitor confirmed much of the country in various stages of drought with some regions in serious condition. The Plains States and entire Southeast are trapped in various stages of unending drought. The West is another story altogether, experiencing lost snowpack like never before in history.

But the most haunting number is the Palmer Drought Severity Index PDSI for March. Based on NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) data, March 2026 recorded an exceptionally low Palmer Drought Severity Index PDSI of -7.84 for the contiguous U.S. This is the most severe March reading since 1895 or 131 years ago.

Mainstream news outlets claim it’s “a normal dry season,” but the intensity and reach more closely resemble a sinister black swan event with earmarks of what could become an irreversible systemic collapse.

The atmosphere is locked in a very high percentile heat shock, plummeting Snow Water Equivalents (SWE) to dangerous lows accompanied by a stiff La Niña feedback loop. Unlike the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, this ‘Double Drought’ is simultaneously draining the fossilized Ogallala Aquifer and pushing the Colorado River Basin past its absolute physical tipping point.

The national power grid and massive AI data centers, mega cities, and 40 million people could be facing an inescapable, catastrophic breaking point. After all, the entire West Coast is totally dependent upon water. It’s everything; it’s the lifeblood of existence.

Snowpack’s “Water Bank” Turning Bankrupt

The snowpack (water bank) is the only thing that keeps that vast infrastructure operational, but it has never been so sparse at this crucial stage. The trusty water bank may be going bankrupt.

The unbelievable heat wave in March triggered a broken-down chain reaction. In the Colorado River Basin, the Rio Grande, and the Sierra Nevada the snow did not melt; it evaporated and forcibly flowed downstream. Drought.gov confirmed the collapse in early April. Snow/Water Equivalent, SWE plummeted. A drought emergency has already been declared in some states in mid-spring, way too early on a normal basis for such a declaration. Alas, this season has experienced not only slight snowfall, but of more significance, the water supply calendar for nearly one-half of America has been nearly destroyed. Tons of water have been “forced down” by inordinate heat in March, overwhelming reservoirs down below that were forced to release massive amounts of precious water, or burst from overflow, that otherwise would have been available during the upcoming hotter summer months. Indeed, it’s a black swan event of unprecedented proportions.

Statement By U.S, Forest Service (April 2026)

“It is unlikely that snowpacks will rebound at this point in the season, leaving scant snow reserves to supply water through the summer months.” (USDA Forest Service d/d April 3^rd, 2026)

Our modern society of billion-dollar mega cities, and massive food supply chains has been established on a 20^th century calendar. A calendar that dictated snow would hold water and spring would arrive on schedule. In 2026 that calendar will cease to exist. If the West has lost its only natural water-holding source for the summer, what will happen when real fire arrives?

The West is losing Snow; the East is Losing Moisture.

Meanwhile, America’s Southeast is heavily locked in extreme drought. Florida is in the worst drought since the turn of the millennium. More than 1,500 wildfires have ripped thru the state of Florida over only the first four months of 2026. Florida peatlands (normally moist) are drying up and smoldering from beneath the surface. In turn, this incinerates the reef system.

The 2026 drought is referred to as a ‘Compound Drought” the result of convergence of three destructive forces. Scientists warned about this for years now; (1) climate change – the planet’s baseline temperature has warmed which turns the atmosphere into a “giant dehumidifier,” draining water from the soil as well as vegetation faster than ever before (2) a long La Nina cycle that deflects the jet stream blocking rainstorms from the South and Great Plains (3) the March 2026 “heat shock” across the country depleting snow reserves and soaking up moisture before the advent of spring.

The West Sucked Dry

The “sponginess of the atmosphere” or how much moisture hot, dry air sucks up from the land is at an eye-popping 77% above normal. This is ‘vapor pressure deficit,” and it’s off the charts. According to UCLA hydroclimatologist Park Williams, this sensitive reading is 25% above the all-time previous record for January thru March in the West. Professor Williams claims that amount of moisture sucking from the ground was previously not considered possible, until now. (Source: Record U.S. Drought Sparks Fears About Wildfires, Water Supply and Food Prices, CBS News, April 18, 2026)

Drought usually peaks in summer, not spring, and that’s what worries scientists this year. America is starting to collapse from its ground up as its fragile topsoil sustains 330 million people.

Winter wheat, a crop planted in the fall to be harvested in the summer, is dying of thirst. The percentage of crops achieving good to excellent grades has plummeted, a dramatic drop compared to the same period last year. As of late April 2026, approximately 68% to 70% of the U.S. winter wheat crop is located in areas experiencing drought According to USDA data, as of late April 2026, 98% of the U.S. cotton crop is located within areas experiencing drought. Such extreme statistics highlights an ongoing threat of high abandonment rates

“Farmers across the Great Plains are confronting an intense drought that threatens winter wheat harvests and is pushing cattle producers toward costly feed purchases…The dryness is expected to persist through spring after weeks of scant rainfall and a late-winter heat spell that fueled massive pasture fires across the nation’s breadbasket. Drought now covers nearly 90% of Nebraska and Oklahoma, with more than half of Nebraska in “extreme” drought.” (US Wheat Crops Wither, Herds Thin as Spring Drought Deepens, The Spokesman Review, est 1883, April 27, 2026)

Ogallala Aquifer Threat

Beneath the arid soil of eight states stretching from South Dakota to the tip of Texas lies Ogallala Aquifer. North America’s largest aquifer. It’s the continent’s backup battery, an invisible ocean containing fossilized water accumulated since the Ice Age. The natural recirculation rate is a few inches per year, but tens of thousands of industrial scale pumps drain hundreds of feet of water, not inches. In 2026, with 80% of Oklahoma and 75-85% of Texas succumbing to surface drought, farmers are pumping full-out.

Drill Results: USGS reports in West Texas confirm that many bore holes into the famous aquifer have hit ‘rock bottom.’

According to The Topeka Capital-Journal d/d Feb. 17, 2026, “Southwest Kansas farmers face significant water cuts to save the Ogallala Aquifer.” But. “save it” for what… to puppy-it-along with decreasing production of both water and crops?

Risky Living: Phoenix- five million inhabitants live in the middle of a desert. For the first time in RE history, a state is regulating RE development based upon water. Contractors are being forced to prove their projects have a guaranteed water supply. Many projects have been rejected.

Meanwhile, a series of AI data centers are being constructed, consuming millions of gallons of water to cool servers. Some centers adopt circular water systems to reduce direct use. However, according to a Ceres study, while direct cooling is a significant factor, “indirect water” required for energy generation accounts for up to 75% of total consumption, a crucial, often overlooked factor found in the Ceres analysis.

According to ABC15 Arizona; “More than 125 data centers already operate in Maricopa County, with many more seeking to establish operations in Arizona. The expansion has created excitement among entrepreneurs while raising concerns from city leaders about costs and infrastructure.” Oh, really!

Yesterday’s Climate Vanishes

The decisions made in the 20^th century were based upon assumptions that tomorrow’s climate will be exactly the same as yesterday’s. But 2026 is the year that assumption may officially crumble.

Who said climate change is a hoax?

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

John Roberts:  The Chief Justice Who Broke American Democracy

David Schultz

 May 4, 2026

FacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail

President George W. Bush announces Roberts’s nomination to be Chief Justice (2005)

When John Roberts appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005, he offered one of the most memorable metaphors in confirmation hearing history. “Judges are like umpires,” he told senators. “Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them.” He promised to call balls and strikes, nothing more. Twenty years later, that promise stands as one of the most consequential deceits in the history of the American judiciary. Roberts has not been an umpire. He has been a pitcher, a batter, and the groundskeeper, and he has consistently rigged the field for one team. The result, measured across ten landmark decisions, eight of whose majority opinions Roberts wrote himself, is a Supreme Court that has done more lasting structural damage to American democracy than any politician, including Donald Trump, has managed to inflict.

The indictment begins with the right to vote. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Roberts authored the opinion gutting Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which had required states with a documented history of racial discrimination to obtain federal preclearance before changing their voting laws. Roberts declared that the racial conditions justifying preclearance were relics of the past. States across the South responded within hours, enacting new voting restrictions that proved his optimism catastrophically wrong. In Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), the Court rewrote Section 2 of the VRA so narrowly that voting laws producing stark racial disparities were rendered effectively immune from challenge.

And the capstone arrived on April 29, 2026, when the Court decided Louisiana v. Callais. In a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, the majority, joined by Roberts, struck down Louisiana’s congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. That map had created a second majority-Black district, drawn specifically to comply with Section 2 as courts had interpreted it. Justice Elena Kagan, in dissent, argued that the majority’s new evidentiary requirements had rendered Section 2 “all but a dead letter.” The crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement has been reduced to ceremonial language. Three decades of systematic Roberts Court jurisprudence accomplished what Jim Crow’s defenders could not achieve by open defiance: the quiet, legalistic suffocation of minority voting power.

Before Callais, Roberts had already corrupted the financial architecture of democracy. In Citizens United v. FEC (2010), the Court struck down limits on corporate political spending, drowning elections in dark money and transforming them from contests of ideas into auctions of influence. Roberts personally wrote Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett(2011), which killed Arizona’s public campaign financing system, the one mechanism that gave ordinary candidates a fighting chance against entrenched wealth. Then in McCutcheon v. FEC (2014), he authored the plurality opinion dissolving aggregate contribution limits, blowing open another pipeline for oligarchic control. American elections, as a practical matter, no longer belong to citizens. Roberts handed them to donors.

He then made democratic representation itself a fiction. In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), Roberts wrote the opinion declaring extreme partisan gerrymandering unreviewable by federal courts, even as workable legal standards to address it were argued directly before him. The result has been legislatures in Texas, North Carolina, and across the country drawing maps not to represent voters but to nullify them. Minority parties govern as majorities. The will of the people is engineered out of the outcome before a single vote is cast.

The final cluster of decisions dismantled what remained of the constitutional framework. In Trump v. Mazars (2020), Roberts authored a test so demanding it effectively ended Congress’s ability to subpoena a corrupt executive, gutting the oversight power that is the legislature’s most essential check. And in Trump v. United States (2024), Roberts authored the majority opinion conferring sweeping immunity on the presidency for official acts, a doctrine with no foundation in the Constitution’s text and no precedent in two and a half centuries of American law. He placed the president above accountability. He called it jurisprudence.

Ten decisions. Eight majority opinions written by Roberts himself, spanning voting rights, campaign finance, redistricting, congressional oversight, and presidential accountability. And throughout it all, Roberts has insisted he is merely the umpire. But an umpire who consistently calls strikes for one team and balls for the other is not officiating. He is fixing the game. Whether Roberts has been pitching and batting in disguise, or whether his purportedly neutral officiating simply happens to favor one side in every close call, the effect on the democratic playing field is identical.

What makes this legacy uniquely devastating, more so than Trump’s disruptions, which future administrations can at least partially reverse, is that Roberts’s damage is structural and durable. Constitutional doctrines do not expire with administrations. Gutted statutes do not restore themselves. Entrenched gerrymanders do not redraw themselves. The Roberts Court’s rulings are baked into the architecture of American governance for a generation or longer.

Ironically, Roberts has repeatedly expressed public concern for the institutional reputation of the Court. He has written and spoken about the dangers of perceiving justices as political actors. The numbers suggest he has failed catastrophically on his own terms. According to the Annenberg Public Policy Center, public trust in the Supreme Court stood at 75% in 2005, the year Roberts was confirmed. By March 2025, that figure had collapsed to 41%, a 27-percentage-point freefall and the lowest level recorded since tracking began. Nearly one in three Americans now say they have no trust whatsoever in the Court to act in their interests. Pew Research finds the Court’s favorable rating is 22 percentage points below its 2020 level. Gallup reports that American confidence in the judicial system hit a record low of 35% in 2024, a 24-point decline in just four years. Among OECD nations, the U.S. now has the largest gap in court confidence, 20 points below the median, in the history of the survey. The partisan chasm tells its own story: 71% of Republicans trust the Court while only 24% of Democrats do, a 47-point divide that reflects not healthy disagreement but a broken institution perceived by much of the country as a political arm of one party.

The Court Roberts has presided over is not perceived as a legal institution. It is perceived as a political one, and the perception is accurate. The man who promised impartiality has delivered the most politically consequential Court in modern history, systematically ruling in favor of one party’s structural interests across voting rights, campaign finance, redistricting, executive power, and congressional oversight.

History will render its verdict in full. Roberts will be remembered not as a careful institutionalist who protected the Court’s legitimacy, but as the Chief Justice who, decision by decision, opinion by opinion, in his own careful prose, took a wrecking ball to the democratic architecture Americans spent generations building. The fingerprints on every breach are his. The legacy is written. And no amount of institutionalist reputation management will erase it.

David Schultz is a professor of political science at Hamline University. He is the author of Presidential Swing States:  Why Only Ten Matter.