Word: croppings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary In a characteristically dire report, the Central Intelligence Agency has just warned of potential global upheavals "almost beyond comprehension." The cause of the chaos: climatic change that will trigger massive crop failures, drought and widespread famine (see ENVIRONMENT). In contrast to this augury of doom, Herman Kahn, ebullient director of the foresighted Hudson Institute, has just looked at the future and found it good. His new book, The Next 200 Years, offers a plausible scenario of declining population growth, rising levels of affluence and, given the right so cio-economic conditions, "virtually eternal...
Drought-Prone. There is ample evidence, the CIA report contends, that the new era is already under way. In the early '60s crop failures hit India and Central Asia, causing major economic and political changes. India had to import massive quantities of U.S. grain, and poor farm yields in the Soviet Union undermined the power of Premier Nikita Khrushchev and contributed to his downfall. The Soviets also suffered agricultural disasters in 1972 and 1974. The drought-prone countries of sub-Saharan Africa have not yet recovered from a recent six-year period of little or no rain. Rice shortages...
...Wisconsin studies, the CIA report concludes that a return to the conditions that prevailed during the Little Ice Age would reduce the frequency of India's monsoons and cause droughts on the subcontinent as often as every four years. This climatic change would also cause major crop failures and famine every five years in China and loss of the Soviet Union's wheat fields in Kazakhstan. Cooler temperatures could also cut crop production in Canada, as well as Northern Europe...
...York City's skyscrapers shimmered in 96° heat, the highest temperature ever recorded there in April, Floridians endured an unseemly chill and tornadoes skipped across Oklahoma and Texas. Heavy rains deluged Texas, Oklahoma and western Kansas-but too late to save the drought-stricken winter wheat crop, whose scraggly remains have been plowed under. Residents of heavily evacuated Minot, N. Dak., breathed easier as their earthen dams continued to hold against the crested Souris River, but 400,000 acres were flooded, dampening the area's harvest hopes for another season. At week's end most...
...whether those best laid of plans will have to be abandoned. One danger is that if Bold Forbes and Honest Pleasure both insist on running full tilt from the start, they could go down in embarrassing defeat, even though the other colts are among the most miserable crop in memory...