Long before it was understood by science, the El Niño phenomenon already left profound marks on humanity.
El Niño is the name given to intense changes in winds and water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean that can drastically transform climate patterns on the planet. Over the centuries, these natural patterns have triggered epic droughts and heat waves and intensified epidemics.
Some researchers claim to see the “fingerprints” of El Niño in political and economic crises in ancient Egypt or in the fall of the Moche civilization, in present-day Peru, more than a thousand years ago. In 1877 and 1878, a famine worsened by El Niño killed millions of people in tropical regions, entrenching inequalities that, as one study wrote, “would later be characterized as ‘first world’ and ‘third world.’”
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At this moment, the world is entering a new phase of El Niño. Researchers warn that it may be one of the strongest ever recorded and use this story as a reminder that natural forces, when they reach maximum intensity, can generate profound volatility and suffering.
Of course, the current El Niño is still in its early stages of formation and may end up not confirming the most aggressive projections. But if the models are right, it should be a very intense phenomenon — and its effects will occur in a world that is more resilient than in the past, but also full of new vulnerabilities.
Compared to previous times, countries today monitor El Niño events with buoys, satellites, ocean measurements and early warning systems. Agriculture is much more sophisticated and many countries exposed to food shocks maintain strategic grain reserves. Nobody talks about large-scale famine today.
Still, experts say a strong El Niño could add pressure to an already fragile global system. The lack of fertilizers, worsened by the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz, is squeezing the lives of farmers. Rising energy prices, fueled by wars in Ukraine and Iran, erode public budgets. And a decades-old safety net has been weakened by cuts in foreign aid from the United States and other countries to poorer nations.
There is the possibility of “a perfect storm of factors,” said Laurie Laybourn, who leads the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, a UK-based think tank. “You can see an increase in poverty, malnutrition, conflict, debt — and all the domino effects that come in the wake of that.”
If history teaches anything, it’s that strong El Niños, like the one that began in 1877, exploit weaknesses that already exist. That episode led to severely dry conditions in several parts of the world, including Brazil, southern Africa and China.
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Few places have been hit harder than southern India. Reports from the time describe extremely thin people trying to survive on roots and even selling children they could not support.
But despite the force of nature, human factors likely increased the death toll, which reached tens of millions. At that time, India was under British colonial rule, and historian Mike Davis, in his 2001 book Late Victorian Holocaustsdescribes how the United Kingdom prioritized imperial interests by maintaining large grain exports from India, even while the local population was starving.
“In practice, Londoners were eating the bread of India,” Davis wrote.
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Another important complication was scientific ignorance. People did not know why the monsoon had failed. Scientists in the 19th century even suggested a link to periods of lower sunspot activity.
A much clearer picture only emerged in the 1960s, when Jacob Bjerknes, a meteorologist at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), managed to piece together the global consequences of the interaction between ocean and atmosphere in the Pacific. Centuries earlier, Peruvian fishermen had already noticed the arrival of schools of tropical fish on their coasts around Christmas — a phenomenon that came to be called “El Niño”, or “Baby Jesus”, in Spanish. Bjerknes made the connection: the warming of the Pacific observed by Peruvians was actually altering climate patterns across the planet.
“It was the ‘big bang’ of this field,” said Michael McPhaden, senior scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “He opened up a new universe of study.”
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In the 1980s, scientists were already in the middle of the Pacific installing buoys to better monitor ocean temperatures. At the same time, researchers began to look for evidence of El Niño’s role in human history, studying growth rings in trees, coral reefs and sailors’ logbooks, and building a rudimentary timeline of its most intense events.
The records are not precise enough to accurately measure all past episodes, but they have generated speculation, such as the hypothesis that an El Niño at the end of the 18th century may have contributed to crop failures linked to the uprisings of the French Revolution. In the case of the 1877 El Niño, which hit India so hard, the documentation is better but still requires inferences. “Working with sea surface temperature data from the 19th century is a bit like putting together a puzzle with many pieces missing,” NOAA oceanographer Boyin Huang wrote in an email.
El Niño events are measured by temperature over a wide rectangular band in the central Pacific. In a moderate episode, temperatures can rise about 1 degree Celsius above the long-term average. But in the biggest El Niños of the last 50 years — those that began in 1982, 1997 and 2015 — anomalies reached 2 degrees Celsius or more above normal. Each of these events has taken a significant economic toll on the world.
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For this year, many projections indicate that the temperature could rise by up to 3 degrees Celsius, something unprecedented. Even the El Niño of 1877, by best estimates, did not reach such magnitude.
“Several models today point to a real chance of a record El Niño,” said Zeke Hausfather, a scientist at Berkeley Earth. “It’s still too early to spike.”
In general, El Niño reaches its peak intensity at the end of the calendar year and pushes average temperatures over the continents upward in the following months. As a result, many scientists project that 2027 will be the hottest year on record.
Every El Niño is different. But, generally speaking, the phenomenon increases the chance of more intense rain in parts of the Americas, while at the same time tending to suppress the Atlantic hurricane season. On the other hand, it increases the risk of drought in South and Southeast Asia, Australia and southern Africa.
In India, which tends to become drier during periods of El Niño, the government has already held preparatory meetings. Vimal Mishra, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Gandhinagar, says the country does not face risks today on the scale of more than a century ago. “If the monsoon fails in one year, we will not see a famine,” he said, citing the public food distribution system, which guarantees access to basic items at subsidized prices.
Mishra highlights, however, that risks remain. If it rains very little, families will consume their savings, reduce expenses, and close businesses. During droughts, school dropout rates increase. “This has a direct impact on the growth rate of the Indian economy,” he said.
He studied India’s great famines and draws a direct line between the episode of the 1870s and the preparedness measures the country is adopting today. “This gives us an idea of how to be better prepared,” he said. “It shows what the worst possible scenario is.”
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