Why the worst El Niño killed millions – and how we can avoid a repeat — SkimNews
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- The 1877-78 El Niño triggered droughts across China, India, Brazil and Africa, causing a famine that killed an estimated 20-30 million in those regions and up to 50 million globally
- Boyin Huang at NOAA reconstructed the 1877/78 event as among the strongest in modern history, with Nino3 index sea-surface temperatures running 2.88°C above average after accounting for background ocean warming
- Current 2026 forecasts project a super El Niño that could outstrip 1877/78, with Pacific sea-surface temperatures predicted to peak 4°C above normal in November — a figure without precedent in the modern record
- Michael McPhaden at NOAA says models first hinted at the coming El Niño in February 2026, with clear signs emerging by April — giving governments a three-month head start before the event began, and AI may soon extend forecasts to two years out
- Colonial governments dramatically worsened the 1877-78 crisis by continuing to tax starving populations, hoarding grain, and enforcing food exports to England, while corrupt Chinese officials raided grain reserves and bandits blocked mountain roads into Shanxi
- Donald Trump issued a January 2025 executive order shutting down a US-funded famine early warning system — it was reinstated six months later but data reporting has been patchy — and the US has severely cut funding to the World Food Programme
- Richard Seager at Columbia University warns the 2026 El Niño "is happening at a very bad time," with the US-Iran conflict and Strait of Hormuz blockade driving up fuel and fertilizer prices and Russia's war in Ukraine curtailing the global wheat trade
Why it matters: The 1877-78 death toll stemmed less from the El Niño itself than from government failure and colonial extraction — a pattern now potentially repeating as the US has dismantled its own famine early warning system and slashed food aid funding just as a potentially record-breaking El Niño forms. Modern forecasting gives months of lead time, but the source explicitly notes that lead time is meaningless without the institutional capacity to act on it.
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