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!
Bear in mind that the climate-control measures being played with by various governments have probably upset weather patterns more than global warming ever has.
In preparation for the 2008 Olympics China seeded clouds with a chemical that would prevent it from raining. They wanted even the weather to look good to the foreign press.
About a month or so ago I read that the drought in one of the regions in China was severe enough that people were dying of starvation, and the Chinese government was preparing to seed the clouds there with chemicals that would force it to rain.
Those couldn’t POSSIBLY be related though, could they?
/s