Well before it was understood, the El Ni\u00f1o phenomenon was leaving its marks on humanity.<\/p>\n
El Ni\u00f1o is the name given to powerful shifts in Pacific Ocean winds and water temperatures that can drastically transform global weather patterns. Over the centuries these natural patterns have sparked epic droughts and heat waves, and have intensified epidemics.<\/p>\n
Some academics even claim to see the fingerprints of El Ni\u00f1o on political and economic crises in ancient Egypt, or on the downfall of the Moche civilization in present-day Peru, more than 1,000 years ago. And in 1877 and 1878, a famine fueled by El Ni\u00f1o killed millions of people across the tropics, hardening inequities that, as one research paper put it<\/a>, \u201cwould later be characterized as the \u2018first world\u2019 and \u2018third world.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Right now, the world is entering a new El Ni\u00f1o phase. Researchers are warning it could be one of the strongest on record and are invoking this history<\/a> as an admonition that natural forces, when they reach their highest magnitude, can lead to profound volatility and hardship.<\/p>\n In general, El Ni\u00f1o makes for wetter conditions in some parts of the Americas while suppressing the Atlantic hurricane season. The phenomenon raises the risk of dryness in South and Southeast Asia, Australia, and southern Africa.<\/p>\n Of course, the current El Ni\u00f1o is in the early stages of formation and might not live up to the hype. But if the forecasts prove accurate, it would be a whopper and its consequences would play out across a world that has grown far more resilient but also has new vulnerabilities.<\/p>\n Compared with those early times, countries today track El Ni\u00f1o events with oceanic gauges and early warning systems. Agriculture is far more sophisticated, and many countries vulnerable to food shocks hold strategic grain reserves. Nobody is predicting large-scale famine.<\/p>\n But experts say an El Ni\u00f1o would add pressure to an already precarious global system. Fertilizer shortages caused by the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz are straining farmers. Rising energy prices resulting from war in Ukraine and Iran are eating into countries\u2019 budgets. And a longstanding safety net has been weakened by cuts in foreign aid to poorer countries by the United States and other nations.<\/p>\n There\u2019s possibility for \u201ca perfect storm of factors,\u201d said Laurie Laybourn, who leads the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, a think tank based in Britain. \u201cYou could see an increase in poverty, malnutrition, conflict, indebtedness, and all of the domino effects that come from that.\u201d<\/p>\n If history offers any lesson, it\u2019s that strong El Ni\u00f1o events, like the one that started in 1877, play upon existing weaknesses. That El Ni\u00f1o led to punishingly dry conditions that spanned the world, including Brazil, southern Africa and China.<\/p>\n Few places were hit harder than southern India. Contemporaneous accounts<\/a> describe stick-thin people trying to survive on roots and even selling off children they couldn\u2019t afford to care for.<\/p>\n But for all the power of nature, man-made factors very likely raised the death toll, which ultimately rose to tens of millions of people. At the time, India was under British colonial rule, and the historian Mike Davis, in his 2001 book \u201cLate Victorian Holocausts,\u201d portrays Britain as prioritizing its imperial interests by maintaining huge grain exports from India even as Indians starved.<\/p>\n \u201cLondoners were in effect eating India\u2019s bread,\u201d Mr. Davis wrote.<\/p>\n Of course, there was another factor complicating the response. People at the time had no idea why the monsoon rains had failed. Scientists in the 19th century theorized a link with weakened sunspot activity<\/a>.<\/p>\n But a far better picture emerged in the 1960s, when Jacob Bjerknes, a meteorologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, pieced together the global consequences of the feedback between the ocean and atmosphere in the Pacific. Centuries earlier, Peruvians had noticed that sometimes tropical fish would unexpectedly show up on their shores around Christmas, a phenomenon eventually named \u201cEl Ni\u00f1o,\u201d or \u201cthe Christ child\u201d in Spanish. Dr. Bjerknes made the connection: The Pacific warming that the Peruvians had spotted was, in fact, altering weather patterns around the world.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was the big bang\u201d realization, said Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. \u201cHe opened up a new universe of study.\u201d<\/p>\n By the 1980s, scientists were on a vessel in the middle of the Pacific, anchoring buoys that enabled improved monitoring of ocean temperature. Separately, researchers sought out clues for El Ni\u00f1o\u2019s place in human history, studying tree ring samples, coral reefs and sailors\u2019 logbooks, and creating a crude timeline of its spikes.<\/p>\n The records weren\u2019t sharp enough to measure past events with certainty. But they have led to speculation about the role of El Ni\u00f1o events across history, including that an El Ni\u00f1o in the late 1700s might<\/a> have played a role in the crop failures that contributed to uprisings in the French Revolution.<\/p>\n For the 1877 El Ni\u00f1o, the one that hit India so hard, the documentation is better, but still involves guesswork. \u201cWorking with nineteenth-century sea surface temperature data is a bit like assembling a puzzle with many missing pieces,\u201d Boyin Huang, a NOAA oceanographer who has studied the scale of the event<\/a>, wrote in an email.<\/p>\n El Ni\u00f1o events are measured by looking at temperature levels in a vast rectangular zone in the central Pacific. In a moderate El Ni\u00f1o, temperatures might climb, say, 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, above a longer-term average. But in the biggest El Ni\u00f1os of the past 50 years \u2014 the ones that started in 1982, 1997, and 2015 \u2014 temperatures have soared 2 degrees Celsius or more beyond the norm. Each of those events levied a global economic toll<\/a>.<\/p>\n