As if oil shortages, endless wars and the existential angst caused by artificial intelligence weren’t worrying enough, a new El Niño is brewing — and everything indicates that it will be one of the most severe in more than a century.
According to several weather models, El Niño, a prolonged weather phenomenon characterized by unusually high temperatures that occurs every two years, could easily be in the modern era this year.
According to the , the this year’s hot spell could make ocean temperatures rise up to 3°C.
Among other consequences, the phenomenon will translate into widespread droughts for some, floods for others and, perhaps the most alarming scenario of all: a food supply chaos world.
To find a historical equivalentscientists had to go back to 1877, the year in which um The Implacable ChildIt unleashed a death toll that few events can rival.
According to the WSJ, the catastrophe fueled prolonged dryculminating in a global famine that killed at least 50 million peoplealthough some estimates point to an even more terrifying number: 60 million. This was the equivalent, at the time, of about 3% of the world population.
According to one published in 2018 in Journal of Climatethis was probably the worst environmental disaster to ever befall humanity and one of the greatest calamities of any kind in the last 150 years, with a loss of lifes comparable to that of the World Wars and the 1918/19 flu epidemic.
As humanity evolved, some suggested that phenomena such as the El Niño of 1877 represented a true test of endurance to our progress, exposing the weak points of our political and economic systems. With the widespread poverty and colonial exploitation fueling devastating famines throughout the 19th century, it is legitimate to say that we failed the test, says .
Although we have traveled a long way since thenskeptics are not without arguments. This year’s El Niño will emerge following widespread droughts, a weakened food supply chain and several years of record-breaking ocean temperatures, to name just a few pressing examples.
2026 will become another chapter in this cycle of avoidable devastationl depends on how we use the technology, resources and knowledge at our disposal.
Although it is tempting to relegate the calamity experienced by our ancestors to a mere footnote in history, the future is never certain — and history does not forgive oversights.
