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Paleoclimate research suggests the ''normal'' long-term weather of the: prairies is much more drought-prone than the past century was.

Article Excerpt
BY COLBY COSH

The last thing anybody who lives on the broad North Saskatchewan River worries about is waking up one morning and having the river not be there. Edmontonians worry more about flooding, if anything; in 1915, the water level rose so high that a heavy trainload of coal had to be parked on the deck of the Low Level Bridge to prevent it from being swept away. But what if our historical memory was even longer than that? Deep in the archives of the Hudson's Bay Company there are reports of drought around Fort Edmonton that practically defy the imagination. At one point during the decade of the 1790s, the "want of water" in the North Saskatchewan became so dramatic that the river became unnavigable for the fort's purposes. And "unnavigable," in a fur-trade context, means that the river was too shallow for a humble canoe.

If the river dried up to such a degree today, the economic consequences for farms and communities up and down that watershed--and for the Edmonton metropolis, where nearly one million people live--would be devastating. But were the dry conditions of the 1790s a once-in-a-millennium fluke? The scientific consensus among students of paleoclimate now tends toward the answer "No." Across the agricultural belt of the Canadian prairies, the real fluke seems to have been a relatively moist 20th century. Even if human activity is not warming the climate of the West, scientists warn that the 21st century may see harsher droughts, and more of them, than any known during the period of mass human habitation in Canada's breadbasket.

The most reliable long-term information about droughts of the past was developed between 1998 and 2001 by Peter Leavitt, a limnologist at the University of...