Climate and the Global Famine of 1876–78
Abstract
From 1875 to 1878, concurrent multiyear droughts in Asia, Brazil, and Africa, referred to as the Great Drought, caused widespread crop failures, catalyzing the so-called Global Famine, which had fatalities exceeding 50 million people and long-lasting societal consequences. Observations, paleoclimate reconstructions, and climate model simulations are used 1) to demonstrate the severity and characterize the evolution of drought across different regions, and 2) to investigate the underlying mechanisms driving its multiyear persistence. Severe or record-setting droughts occurred on continents in both hemispheres and in multiple seasons, with the “Monsoon Asia” region being the hardest hit, experiencing the single most intense and the second most expansive drought in the last 800 years. The extreme severity, duration, and extent of this global event is associated with an extraordinary combination of preceding cool tropical Pacific conditions (1870–76), a record-breaking El Niño (1877–78), a record strong Indian Ocean dipole (1877), and record warm North Atlantic Ocean (1878) conditions. Composites of historical analogs and two sets of ensemble simulations—one forced with global sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and another forced with tropical Pacific SSTs—were used to distinguish the role of the extreme conditions in different ocean basins. While the drought in most regions was largely driven by the tropical Pacific SST conditions, an extreme positive phase of the Indian Ocean dipole and warm North Atlantic SSTs, both likely aided by the strong El Niño in 1877–78, intensified and prolonged droughts in Australia and Brazil, respectively, and extended the impact to northern and southeastern Africa. Climatic conditions that caused the Great Drought and Global Famine arose from natural variability, and their recurrence, with hydrological impacts intensified by global warming, could again potentially undermine global food security.
." It was arguably the worst environmental disaster to ever befall humanity and one of the worst calamities of any sort in at least the last 150 years, with a loss of life comparable to the World Wars and the influenza epidemic of 1918/19.
"The Global Famine was initiated by severe droughts in several regions that persisted for multiple seasons between 1875 and 1878. In Fig. 1, we identify the temporal evolution of these regional droughts. The drought started in India with a failure of the 1875 winter monsoon season, and dry conditions persisted through the summer of 1877. In East Asia, the drought started in spring 1876, and the lack of rainfall persisted through summer 1878. Subsequently, droughts developed in parts of South Africa, northern Africa, and northeastern Brazil in following seasons that lasted till at least 1878. Relatively shorter but severe droughts also occurred in western Africa, Southeast Asia, and Australia between mid-1877 and 1878. Droughts in most of these regions are often associated with the occurrence of El Niño events (e.g., Kumar et al. 2006; Slingo and Annamalai 2000; Ropelewski and Halpert 1987; Wang et al. 2017; Xu et al. 2004). While previous studies (Kiladis and Diaz 1986; Aceituno et al. 2009) have identified the presence of a strong El Niño during the Great Drought, the El Niño conditions only developed in 1877 and waned in 1878. However, the drought in key areas afflicted by famines—including India, northeastern Brazil, and China—started prior to the development of the El Niño or lasted longer than its duration.
https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0159.1
