Quote:
Originally Posted by Raellus
I wonder why the 1e creative team decided to go with a megadrought in HW, instead of nuclear-winter, the latter being very much in vogue at the time it was written. Maybe it was precisely because nuclear-winter was so in vogue and they decided to zig instead of zag, to make T2k stand out?
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Pretty sure it was both. And Howling Wilderness explicitly addresses these issues (page 11):
The winters following the exchange were colder than average - that of 1997/98 was especially severe. For reasons not completely understood, however, the nuclear exchange seemed to have altered world rainfall patterns beginning in late 2000. The effects of this were catastrophic. The wheat-growing regions of the upper Midwest, upon which Civgov depended for its food, suffered a cold winter with almost no snowfall. The winter wheat crop, which depends upon the insulating effects of snow to protect the young plants from the cold, was devastated. To make matters worse, spring was abnormally dry over most of North and Central America.
It seems likely to me that while it was abnormally dry in those specified regions, there was a LOT more precipitation (and and/or snow) in others. For instance, again in Howling Wilderness (pages 44 & 45):
Rainfall conditions have remained pretty much unaltered in the Southwest. However, many of the rivers which flow from the north have all but dried up, and irrigation has become impossible. No real agriculture has been performed there since the Mexican occupation.
In the Pacific Northwest, the shift in rainfall has been the opposite from that in the rest of the country: an increase instead of a decrease. On some days it now seems like the rainfall at Seattle rivals that of the Orinoco basin, and the effect on agriculture has been deleterious, but not disastrously so.