From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Essay by Eric Worrall

Beware the horror of temperatures a few degrees warmer than normal.

Last Time an El Niño Was This Bad, It Killed 50 Million People

“It was arguably the worst environmental disaster to ever befall humanity.”
By Joe Wilkins
Published May 14, 2026 8:57 AM EDT

As if oil shortages, perpetual wars, and the existential angst of AI weren’t stressful enough, there’s an El Niño brewing — and it’s looking like it’ll be one of the most severe in over a century.

…

To find a historical equivalent, scientists have had to reach all the way back to 1877, when a merciless El Niño unleashed death on a scale few events can rival. Per the WSJ, the catastrophe fueled ongoing droughts, culminating in a global famine that killed at least 50 million people, though some estimates peg the loss of life at an even more horrifying 60 million — around 3 percent on the total population on Earth at the time. 

As climate researchers wrote in a 2018 study of the famine: “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.”

…Read more: https://futurism.com/science-energy/el-nino-killed-50-million

Sadly the coming global catastrophe is unlikely to interrupt the ability of climate whiners to pen ridiculous articles.

There may be a food crisis brewing, but it has nothing to do with climate change or El Nino.

While President Trump’s policies have ensured energy self sufficiency in the USA, except in California, climate obsessed places like Australia and Europe, whose reality challenged leaders thought we could live without fossil fuel energy security, experienced such severe price and availability problems, farmers in affected countries were struggling to plant or harvest crops.

Since the Aussie crop sowing crisis earlier this year, Australian fuel prices have stabilised for now, after Prime Minister Albanese suggested to the Sultan of Brunei that a failure to deliver fuel might be met with a failure to deliver food. But we won’t know how much impact the high costs over the last few months have impacted crop sowing decisions and food prices until later this year.

Parts of Africa which are normally self sufficient may be in even worse shape because of their vulnerable fuel supply chains, though hard data on the situation in Africa is difficult to find.