The Atlantic Ocean was also unusually warm from 1877 to 1879.
“It was the strongest Indian Ocean Dipole on record,” says Singh. In 1877 a second climate cycle, the Indian Ocean Dipole, was active – meaning the western Indian Ocean was warmer than the east. That makes it bigger than the huge El Niños of 1997-16. “This event was the strongest El Niño that has occurred since the 1850s.” Sea surface temperatures remained high for 16 months. “Now we have a lot more data,” says Singh. It has been clear since the 1980s that the 1877-78 El Niño was intense. This affects weather all around the world, bringing storms to some places and drought to others. During an El Niño, warm water spreads over the Pacific, releasing heat into the air.
The most obvious was a big El Niño in 1877-78. In north China, the drought was the worst in the last 300 years. The information from South America and Africa was not good enough to make such a determination. “We find it’s the most severe event in the 800-year record in Asia,” says Singh. For other places, like China, the team used estimates of rainfall based on data from tree rings. Fortunately, in India the British Empire helped set up a network of rain gauges. The first step was gathering weather data from a time before weather forecasting. “We knew there were droughts in these places, but we didn’t know how severe they were,” she says. Now Singh and her colleagues, including Davis, have examined the drought in detail. Either way, tens of millions died, putting the famine in the same ballpark as the 1918 influenza epidemic, the world wars, and perhaps even the Black Death of the 1300s. Our World in Data puts it at 19 million, but excludes several countries.
Like all historical death tolls, this figure is uncertain. He estimated that 50 million people died. The famine was described by Mike Davis at the University of California, Riverside in his 2001 book Late Victorian Holocausts. The British continued exporting grain for profit, leaving little for the local people to eat. At the time India was controlled by the British Empire, and British policies exacerbated the drought’s effects. In India the local manifestation of the event is known as the Great Famine.
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