Like an approaching Tsunami, El Niño events do give some warning before their arrival.
Following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, impacts on global food security are already setting off alarms. My concern is that the falling dominoes will be exacerbated as the impacts of a building El Niño system could trigger, at least, food insecurity like that in 2011-12.
That episode was triggered by a 1000 year drought in Russia, which lead to a cut-off in Russian grain exports, precipitating food shortages, political unrest, and the “Arab Spring” which swept away governments across North Africa.
This time the vulnerable area includes several nuclear-armed states across Asia.
Predictions are tough, especially about the future.
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.”
But there are other key differences, too. At the time, there was no way to know that such a powerful El Niño was coming nor what it meant. Modern-day knowledge about the phenomenon was boosted by a super El Niño more than a century later from 1982 to 1983.
And because of great advancements in climate monitoring and prediction, the world is now much more prepared to deal with the consequences.
The devastating losses associated with the super El Niño of 1877 to 1878 aren’t likely to repeat today because the social, political and economic factors that exacerbated the effects don’t currently exist.
Still, such an extreme climate event could have significant impacts on food security, particularly in places most vulnerable to long-lasting adverse weather — which could lead to global issues.
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Of greatest certainty is that the El Niño will spike global temps to a new, higher plateau, as uber-expert Kevin Trenberth described to me a decade ago, as the then-current El Niño was doing exactly that.