Word: drought
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Mainland China was having its own troubles with the elements. Peking reported that Honan province was suffering a cruel drought, while at the same time severe rains have flooded much of the Peking area in what the People's Daily calls "a disaster without precedent for some hundred years." Then, added the Chinese, swarms of locusts had moved into Honan, Shantung and Kiangsu provinces, stripping leaves from crops on thousands of acres of farmland...
Population: 100,000. The Negev, at the strategic crossroads of three continents, has obvious value to Israel and the West. Yet few parts of the world qualify better for the name "badlands," the desert so scarred by erosion and so parched by drought (less than 2 in. of rainfall in some areas) that many engineers believe only water pipelines from the north can make it habitable-and then on a minor scale. Glueck disagrees. He argues that the Negev once supported a fairly dense population, possibly 100,000 or more people, and that now it can be made to support...
...propaganda claims when providentially the government found a way to shift much of the blame: nature this spring took a cruel hand in China, as it so often has before. While flooding rains fell over huge chunks of Central China, the provinces of Kirin and Hopei were parched by drought. In Szechwan, a force of 40 million Chinese was working desperately to keep a wheat crop, badly weakened by unseasonably warm weather in the spring, from toppling over. In Honan, 5,000,000 farmers were battling swarms of insects, and six other provinces were plagued by plant fungus. Finally, last...
...that most weather originates over the oceans, meteorologists are studying its mighty motions as the key to the world's climate. A change in the direction of the flow of an ocean current can change the weather for an area miles inland, shift the course of hurricanes, bring drought to fertile lands or rains to arid deserts. The ocean as a whole is a huge heat-exchange engine carrying heat from the boilers of the Tropics to the condensers of the Poles...
...Aires, has nourished Argentina's agricultural past; but for its heavy-industrial future, Argentina is looking toward continent's-end Patagonia. Outwardly, Patagonia seems little more than 300,000 sq. mi. of wasteland lashed by 60-m.p.h. antarctic winds, blinded by spinning dust devils, cursed by endless drought that is relieved by only 5 in. of rain a year. Its 500,000 inhabitants earn a rugged living by running 18 million sheep and 1,500,000 goats on scrub grass...