The Dust Bowl took two years of "hey this is a drought", before people started dying and were forced to migrate - penniless - to simply survive.

That's not accurate. What happened is that the Great American Desert got rebranded as the "Great Plains" and a whole bunch of people were encouraged to come out, tear up the buffalo grass and plant wheat. Then the bottom fell out of wheat, Hoover refused to prop it up, and all the people who came out and carved up 640 acres of free land left, thereby leaving a bunch of denuded dirt that did nothing to forestall further desertification. The '20s were abnormally wet; the '30s were abnormally dry and a bunch of rootless pioneers with less than 5 years working the land had no impetus to stick around as their farmsteads literally took to the air.

What we're taught of the Dust Bowl is that "zomg it was a terrible drought" when in fact it's "zomg the land husbandry of the American West has been appalling." The effects had even been predicted. And while I recognize that in some ways this supports your argument, it's important to note that the Dust Bowl was the result of a decade or two of rapacious agriculture while the current problems we're facing are the end-stage for a century of farming practices.

It's not going to be good. It's not going to be pretty. But it's also not going to be fast.