“What Louis could not have known was that one root of his “misfortunes” was not any one of his subjects. It was El Niño, the climatic fluctuation that has sown misfortune for humankind for millennia. Today, as global temperatures rise, El Niño events will likely become more dramatic—causing longer, drier droughts, extreme floods, and more unpredictable weather.”
“Stories of how El Niño shaped history are thus more than mere curiosities, says Brian Fagan, author of Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations.”
““You cannot study climate change without looking at human experience of climate in the past,” he says. We might live in a world of billions more people, but past El Niños can still offer insights into human behavior. “They won’t tell you how to do something,” Fagan says, “but they can give you precedents for how you might.””
“Take, for example, Europe: It’s believed that as the South Pacific Ocean warms, air pressure drops in the North Pacific, causing anomalies downstream over North America and northwestern Europe. These changes can speed up the polar jet stream, the fast-moving air current that circles Earth’s upper latitudes like a belt, and increase activity in swirls of air over the Atlantic called eddies. All of this can add up to very strange weather—like that which France saw in the late 1700s.”
“The French Revolution sprouted as the harvest, plagued by a frigid winter, died. It was so cold in winter of 1787-88 that wolves were said to have left the Alps to stalk the countryside. Spring wasn’t any better, as massive hailstorms laid fields to waste. In the next year, bread prices doubled. As another excessively cold winter descended, a fifth of Paris, according to church records, relied on charity for food. Bakeries and granaries were robbed, and pamphleteers demanded the Estates General, the legislative assembly of France’s three social classes, address the dwindling bread supply.”
“El Niño alone did not depose France’s monarch; political and social issues had long been simmering below the surface, waiting to be channeled by radical Enlightenment philosophy. But the shortages brought by El Niño pushed these issues to the forefront. Instead of a series of changes that might have occurred over decades, El Niño helped topple the system all at once.”
“The French monarchy is not the first empire El Niño has deposed. Just look to Peru, formerly the home of the Moche civilization—a once-flourishing empire which, by the end of the 7th century, El Niño almost washed off the map.”
“For five centuries, the Moche, ruled by warrior-priests in massive adobe temples, had controlled a sprawl of fishing towns and canal-irrigated fields on the Peruvian west coast. It was a civilization seemingly well adjusted to the region’s variable climate—that is, until the rain vanished for 30 years. Grain supplies dwindled, leaving only anchovies for food. Then, near 600 AD, the anchovies disappeared, too, and rain returned with a vengeance. Floods swept away fields and swallowed towns. As the rain fell, the bodies of human sacrifices built up in the mud—attempts by the Moche rulers to appease the gods and slow El Niño’s chaos.
In desperation, the leaders of the Moche chose to abandon their capital, moving north and inland to two new cities. But El Niño was not done with the Moche. Less than a century later, it returned, bringing another cycle of floods and drought. Famine and revolt followed; around 700 AD, both cities were abandoned.”
“The worst effects of El Niño are most often borne by the poor. This has been seen time and again in India, where El Niño’s impacts on harvest-bringing monsoons can lead to famines of astonishing devastation: During just one, in 1877, an estimated 18.5 million Indians perished.”
“El Niño is an “episodically potent force in the history of tropical humanity,” he says. “If, as Raymond Williams once observed, ‘Nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history,’ we are now learning that the inverse is equally true: There is an extraordinary amount of hitherto unnoticed environmental instability in modern history.””