The 1870s ‘Super El Niño’ That Killed Millions

It started with a failed monsoon season in India in the winter of 1875-1876. Then the rains didn’t come the following summer, either. Crops withered in the scorched and cracked earth, and grain stores dwindled. It was the beginning of the Great Famine, a multiyear environmental and political disaster in southern India that killed millions.  

But the tragedy didn’t stop there. Northern China was also struck by its most severe drought in 300 years and suffered catastrophic crop failures. Across the world in Brazil, it was called the Grande Seca (the “Great Drought”) with record-high temperatures, zero rain and untold numbers of peasants dead from starvation.  

When it was finally over, the global famines of 1876 to 1878 had claimed an estimated 50 million lives worldwide. That was roughly 3 percent of the world’s population.  

There was no scientific explanation at the time for the killer weather events of the 1870s. The world’s foremost thinkers blamed sunspots for the sudden shift in the planet’s weather patterns. Today, climate scientists know that the global calamity was triggered by a “super El Niño,” one of the strongest El Niño events ever recorded.  

El Niño events occur typically every two to seven years, and extreme El Niño events have likely been happening throughout human history. More than 4,000 years ago, the collapse of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia was triggered by droughts that might have been caused by a succession of strong El Niño events. The same climatic forces might have also played a part in the demise of the Moche civilization in ancient Peru and the decline of the Maya between about A.D. 750 and 900.  

A typical El Niño event is disruptive, but not necessarily disastrous. Under normal climatic conditions, the trade winds over the tropical Pacific Ocean blow from east to west. That pushes warm surface water toward Southeast Asia, which fuels rainfall across the region, including seasonal monsoons. Meanwhile, there’s colder water off the west coast of South America, which leads to dryer weather overall.  

Under El Niño conditions, the normal precipitation patterns are swapped. Changes in the wind and currents in the Pacific cause warmer surface water to build up in the central and eastern tropical Pacific, while the western Pacific becomes cooler than normal. That means drier conditions in parts of Southeast Asia and wetter weather in parts of the Americas.

The strength of an El Niño event is measured in part by how much warmer than normal the surface water is in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Anything over 0.5 degrees Celsius qualifies as an El Niño, but some events are far more powerful, says Deepti Singh, head of the Climate Extremes and Impacts Lab at Washington State University.  

At the peak of 1982-1983 El Niño—one of the strongest El Niño events in modern history—surface temperatures were 2.2 degrees Celsius above normal, enough to cause weather-related disasters on every continent, including droughts, wildfires and historic floods.  

But even that event pales in comparison to the El Niño of 1876 to 1878. Some reconstructions estimate that Pacific surface temperatures peaked at more than 3 degrees Celsius above normal. “In the instrumental record, that’s the strongest El Niño event ever recorded,” Singh says.  

A typical El Niño lasts between nine and 12 months, but there was nothing typical about the El Niño of the 1870s. The temperature swap in the Pacific was accompanied by two other extreme weather patterns, one in the Indian Ocean and another in the Northern Atlantic. The confluence of so many anomalous weather events stretched the deadly effects of the El Niño over three years, making it longer and more intense than normal.

India was the first to fall victim to the historic El Niño. In parts of southern India, the winter monsoon (October to December) accounts for up to half of annual rainfall. After four years of weak winter monsoons, the winter rains of 1875-76 were the third lowest on record. That was followed by the driest summer monsoon season ever recorded in 1877.  

The results were devastating. British newspaper dispatches from India included sketches of stick-thin refugees crowding into cities to beg for famine relief. The Great Famine of 1876-78 claimed the lives of between 12.2 million and 29.3 million people in India, according to Mike Davis’ book, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World.  

The Dingwu Famine is the name given to the devastating famine caused by punishing drought and consecutive crop failures from 1876 to 1878 in northern China. Relief efforts were slow and failed to reach many areas of mountainous Shanxi province, where millions died of starvation. Desperate families were forced to eat their homes, which were made from sorghum stalks. Across all of China, between 19.5 million and 30 million people perished during the El Niño-triggered climate crisis, according to Davis.  

As drought continued in India and China, it also took hold in the backcountry of Brazil. The Nordeste (Northeast) region was home to rural cattle ranchers and cotton farmers dependent on the cyclical rains. When the rains failed to arrive in the summer of 1877, millions of starving refugees fled the countryside for coastal cities.

“The despair of hunger has led the indigent population to eat cows that have died of carbuncle, knowing, and saying, that they will soon die from eating them,” wrote a Brazilian priest, “and eating horses, dogs, cane already chewed by others, pieces of leather, and anything else they can find. It is horror upon horror!” 

It’s estimated that up to 2 million Brazilians died in the same global famine that struck India and China.  

What’s doubly tragic about the millions of deaths linked to the 1870s El Niño event is that so many of them were avoidable. They were victims of bad policy, not just extreme weather.  

“A drought doesn’t automatically mean that there’s going to be a famine,” says Singh, co-author with Davis of a 2018 paper about the global famine of 1876-1878. “A drought is what we call a ‘climate hazard.’ What makes it a disaster is the ways in which we respond to those climate hazards.”  

Historians have sharply criticized the response of the British-controlled Indian government to the drought and growing food crisis. As Indian grain supplies dwindled, the British chose to export grain to England rather than feed the starving masses. Famine refugees who were able to work were given meager rations, but, in general, Viceroy Lord Lytton’s government took a “hands off” approach to famine relief.

The British journalist William Digby wrote that when “the part played by the British Empire in the nineteenth century is regarded by the historian fifty years hence, the unnecessary deaths of millions of Indians would be its principal and most notorious monument.” 

In China, too, the response to the climate crisis was hobbled by a society reshaped by 19th-century imperialism. In their paper, Singh and her colleagues point out that China’s agricultural workforce was decimated before the droughts, and so were local means of production that could have provided relief faster to rural population.  

The leadership of Brazil was also slow to address the drought crisis in the Nordeste, with some legislators claiming it was a punishment from God for Brazil’s materialistic culture. When hundreds of thousands of desperate famine refugees arrived in Brazilian cities, many were organized into work camps, where crowded and unsanitary conditions led to the spread of smallpox, killing untold thousands more.  

The impact of the historic 1870s El Niño event and its disastrous response reverberated long after the rains returned. China’s Shanxi province didn’t regain its 1875 population levels until 1953. And Brazil’s Nordeste region was so wiped out by deaths and emigration that some argue it never fully recovered. In his book, Davis argued that the El Niño events of the late 19th century helped to create the global inequalities that persist today as the “first world” and the “third world.”  

While the El Niño event of 1876 to 1878 may be the strongest on record, Singh and other climate scientists predict that the 2026-2027 El Niño could be even stronger.