On Prophecies in "The Bird Saviors": Dust Storms in Texas

So my forthcoming novel, The Bird Saviors—due out in (what’s left of) bookstores in May/June—opens with a dust storm in southern Colorado, and when I began writing it some five years ago, I imagined it set in a fuzzy ‘near future’ time, when climate change had caused enough drought to cause dust storms similar to the ones of the great Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. Unfortunately, this imagined reality is now coming true. Besides the wicked dust storms of Phoenix that occurred this summer, we’re now seeing dust storms in Texas. This is a quote from the MSNBC article:
“No injuries were reported from the dust cloud reminiscent of those shown in Dust Bowl photos from the late 1930s. The dust cloud was yet another byproduct of the persistent drought in West Texas, Ziebell said. The U.S. Drought Monitor map released Oct. 11 showed much of Texas, including the South Plains, were still experiencing “exceptional drought” — the most severe category. In an Oct. 6 statement, the National Weather Service in Lubbock reported that there was a “high likelihood” that 2011 could be the driest on record across the South Plains.”
You can read the entire article here, which also includes a (shaky) video:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44939529/ns/weather/#.Tp1w6JxSl3w
Youtube also has more videos, though I saw this one on London’s Daily Mail, which has some funny voiceover from the people shooting the video, including the line spoken by a child, I think: “What’s so good about dust?” Here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2050475/Texas-dust-storm-video-footage-captures-moment-Lubbock-engulfed-clouds.html
And this is in a time when virtually the entire Republican presidential candidate field rejects global warming, and the Democrats don’t have the guts to stand up for science, and to take a stand for the future.