The Washington Post reports:

As chances rise for one of the strongest El Niño events on record later this year, the potential for dangerous conditions has prompted comparisons to 1877, when such an event drove catastrophe around the globe.

El Niño is a warming of ocean waters in the east-central tropical Pacific that develops every few years. This year, ocean temperatures there could surge 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above average and break records.

The climatic shift devastated crops nearly 150 years ago, raising the question of whether a similar disruption could threaten global food security yet again. The strongest El Niño on record from 1877 to 1878 fueled conditions that led to a global famine which killed more than 50 million people across India, China, Brazil and elsewhere. That was 3 to 4 percent of the estimated global population at the time, equal to at least 250 million people if it happened today.

“It was arguably the worst environmental disaster to ever befall humanity,” researchers have written about the event.

This disaster took years to unfold. Drought began spreading across the tropics and subtropics in 1875. In the years that followed, a combination of strong climate forces in the Indian and Atlantic oceans formed alongside the record-breaking El Niño, amplifying and prolonging the drought.

Deepti Singh, an associate professor at Washington State University who has studied this super El Niño, said famines are not an inevitable consequence of droughts. The deliberate actions of colonialists in the 1870s disrupted local systems that communities relied on for being resilient to climate variations, Singh said.

Might similar consequences unfold today?

“Simultaneous multiyear droughts similar to those in the 1870s could happen again,” Singh said. “What is different now is that our atmosphere and oceans are substantially warmer than they were in the 1870s, which means the associated extremes could be more extreme.” [Continue reading…]