muawiyah,
I am pinging others on this ping. I am no climatologist (sp), and don’t claim to be one.
However, I have interviewed many fisheries biologists, and learned a lot about crappie population crashes experienced here many years ago, when the native white nosed crappie pops crashed and the state WL agency began the black nosed crappie stockings.
I remember all of them telling me droughts run in seven year cycles. I know we (Tennessee and many southern states) are at least two years into this cycle. It may be more, since I moved to my present location three years ago and began getting serious about my garden two summers ago.
I have been thinking about this recently, while planning my 2009 veggie garden. I have a sprinkler system planned, and to back it up I am catching rainwater (from gutters) and keeping them in gallon milk jugs, with seals (keeps out mosquitos) like a freeper suggested last summer on the gardening thread.
Like I said, I am not an expert on anything, but I did take to heart what the biologists told me about the drought cycles and the idea of catching rainwater when it is available.
Overwhelming all of them are the major North American droughts that occur on a roughly 21/22 year cycle, and each time in roughly a different quadrant of "flyover country" (Great Plains states, Midwest, Panhandle, and Centrla South). When those happen, the local things just get pushed aside and the drought happens even if it's supposed to be a rainy year.
China is known to have a similar cycle.
What we have this time is an "out of turn" situation. Back in the 1990s, the drought cycle skipped a beat and happened 11/12 years after the 1987 drought in the MidAtlantic and Lower Midwest.
Lots of folks got excited about it because it fit into a Global Warming theory they had.
Obviously it didn't mean anything more than the time-line was getting broken up, which always happens anyway ~ this stuff is more art than precise prediction.
What we do have, though, is a population of 5 billion peasants scattered rather evenly all over the world, and they know what they see, taste, touch and feel, and this year, building on their rememrance of $20 a bag rice last year, they KNOW we are in a drought!