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 EDTAs 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.”
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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.
It May kill 50M OR it may not. Or It may only kill 49.9M. Though most likely it will kill 20 or 30 <100. They’ll blame numerous other causes as attributable to El Nino. Like dying WITH Covid vs dying FROM Covid
Most likely it will kill no one, and there will be a population surge from the decrease in deaths and increase in food.
There can’t be an increase in food when the flow of 40% of global fertilizers is being blocked.
This will result in a higher death rate,
and then will be blamed on warming,el nino.
In these times, more than 60 million people die every year.
And if you wait 100 years, the number will be 6 billion.
A very good point
Average annual mortality rates put the lie to all the climatard bullshyte.
Numerous published studies have revealed that worldwide there are about 9 or more times more deaths from excess-environmental cold than there are from excess-environmental heat.
For example, see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542519625000543
for the abstract (and link to full pdf article as free download) for “Are there more cold deaths than heat deaths?”, published March 2025 in The Lancet Planetary Health. The abstract there has this statement:
“In that same global analysis, . . . which corresponds to approximately 4.6 million deaths from cold and about 489,000 from heat, a ratio of roughly 9:1 of cold versus heat.
Therefore, wouldn’t a reasonable person take joy that any further global warming would have the net effect of potentially saving human lives (simply calculated to be at least 9*50e^6 = 450 million people) around the planet instead of fretting over “global warming potentially “killing about 50 million people”?
Misquote, but appropriate here I think: “The math shall make you free.”
N.B. A few WUWT articles on excess deaths from cold versus heat, over just the past five years:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/04/25/govt-cover-up-inconvenient-winter-excess-deaths-data/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/09/27/heat-wave-versus-cold-wave-deaths-in-the-u-s-and-the-pacific-northwest/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/09/01/rising-global-temperatures-saving-millions-of-lives-study-finds-cold-kills-30-times-more/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/03/11/the-us-blows-hot-and-cold/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/06/25/why-do-they-lie-about-extreme-temperature-deaths/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/06/29/extreme-temperatures-linked-to-nearly-1-million-deaths/
There are more.
It will be the Godzilla of El Ninos, but instead of being nuclear-fueled, it will be fueled and “turbo-charged” by man made “carbon” rampaging throughout the land, and wreaking havoc and destruction everywhere!
Clearly we need the King Kong of human ingenuity to combat this Godzilla capable of causing 50 million deaths.
If only humans over the last 150 years had thought to invent some more efficient ways to transport water to parched crops, or use fossil fuel feedstock to create fertilizers, or even create GM crops that are more drought tolerant!
Thank Goodness it’s Godzilla…the 50M will be confined to Tokyo and surrounding prefecture
AS I’ve said before, since the climate alarmists are finding that as their standard everyday rantings are being ignored, laughed at or derided more and more consistently, they are becoming more desperate. So why stop at warning about the mild effects about a non-existent climate crisis; just go for hyper-exaggerations. They’re like a football team that’s hopelessly behind in the score, so every time they get the ball, they throw a long pass hoping for a touchdown but wind up getting trounced anyway. And if they throw in a few total inaccuracies and outright lies, why worry as long as it has the proper effect. Except in this case it doesn’t because as usual the item is full of conjectures of what might, could or may happen if this extreme event materializes. And if it doesn’t, they’ll find some other climate disaster that’s just around the corner.
Considering that last few El Ninos were not detrimental to health, and the fact that extreme cold kills roughly 10 times what extreme warmth does, it is disingenuous and an attempt in misleading the public by reaching back a century and half to find the one line instance of El Nino causing a major crisis. Seems the article writers conveniently forgot or were unaware of the link between real major human health crises like the Black Plague during the Little Ice Age, Justinian’s Plague during the 500s, and the Bronze Age Collapse that all occurred during an extended cold period. Extended warm periods adjacent to those above, the Medieval, Roman and Minoan Warm Periods respectively were times of huge advances in civilization and human health and wellbeing.
I’m hoping that it brings a lot of snow to Colorado for the 2026/27 ski season.
Damn those SUVs from 150 years ago affecting the climate now
The writers of such alarmist articles are instructed to avoid facts about those warming periods spurred advances of civilization and population because they haven’t forgotten the adage of never letting the facts get in the way of a good story. In addition, no one should be surprised if outfits like Greenpeace, The Sierra Club, the Suzuki Foundation, Environmental Defense, Friends of the Earth, etc. stipulate to the media that their donations are contingent on the exaggeration of the climate crisis narrative. And let’s not forget that Left-leaning governments like the American Democrats, the Canadian Liberals, and the British Labor Party are almost guaranteed to make the same demands.
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.
The crisis will hit us exactly two days before the day after tomorrow…
Reducing the Earth’s population is a top agenda item for leftists. You know, promoting “Sustainability”.
Plus, El Nino’s are an all natural event. When does the cheering begin?
“Plus, El Nino’s are an all natural event.”
And UAH shows that El Nino events are responsible for ALL the warming in the UAH atmospheric data.
In 47 odd years, there has been no human caused atmospheric warming.
El Niño seems to be the proximate cause of the “step-ups” in the temperature data, but solar activity is probably the majority cause for the longer-term warming since the end of the Dalton Minimum.
Solar activity provides the energy for El Nino events (plus maybe some volcanic energy)
Recently there has been an increase in absorbed solar energy, especially in the tropical oceans.
Nothing to do with CO2.
Technically a nit, but UHI was caused by building cities, therefore anthropogenic.
The southwest US is suffering from a mega drought. Hopefully, El Nino will bring lots of rain, but this won’t happen till late fall and early winter.
I lived through the 1983 El Nino in northern Chile. It was rather wet, and being Dutch, we were blamed for it.
The reality check is coming hard. Australia’s One Nation now polling at 32%, 4% points above Labor.
In two years, ON could be 50+% so will not even need preferences to govern.
USA has a 10 year head start on Australia in reversing energy insecurity. A lot of low hanging fruit in just getting rid of artificial CO2 imposts but a long time before the country has energy security again.
Here’s what NOAA’s weekly ENSO status report says:
ENSO-neutral conditions are present.
Equatorial sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are near-to-above-average in the east-central Pacific Ocean. ENSO-neutral conditions favored through April-June 2026 (80% chance). In May-July 2026, El Niño is likely to emerge (61% chance) and persist through at least the end of 2026.
Source:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
It is interesting that the climate propaganda mill is now blaming “a super El Nino” for the near-global (three continent) drought & famine of 1876-78. That’s news to me. I’ve seen estimates that it killed 3.7% of the world’s population (this article says up to 3%).
For comparison, WWII is estimated to have killed 2.7%, the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic killed an estimated 2% of world population, and Covid-19 killed about 0.1%.
The WaPo version is paywalled, so I haven’t read it, but their subtitle says, “a lot has changed since what might have been the worst environmental disaster in human history.”
That’s true, but somehow I doubt that they mentioned that rising CO2 levels are mitigating drought impacts on crops.
As CO2 levels have risen, drought incidence has decreased, but only slightly. However, drought impacts have decreased considerably. The reason is well understood.
Drought impact mitigation results from improved water use efficiency and drought resilience, from reduced stomatal conductance. Here are some papers about it:
De Souza, A.P. et al. (2015). “Changes in Whole-Plant Metabolism during the Grain-Filling Stage in Sorghum Grown under Elevated CO2 and Drought.” Plant Physiology, 169(3), Nov 2015, 1755–1765. https://doi.org/10.1104/pp.15.01054
Fitzgerald GJ, et al. (2016). “Elevated atmospheric [CO2] can dramatically increase wheat yields in semi-arid environments and buffer against heat waves.” Glob Chang Biol. 22(6), 2269-84. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.13263
Chun, J.A. et al. (2021). “Effect of elevated carbon dioxide and water stress on gas exchange and water use efficiency in corn.” Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 151(3), 378–384, ISSN 0168-1923. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2010.11.015
EXCERPT: “There have been many studies on the interaction of CO2 and water on plant growth. Under elevated CO2, less water is used to produce each unit of dry matter by reducing stomatal conductance.”
We’re hoping for a bit of rain here in Texas. Niña or Niño, we know it will be warm this summer, just like every other one.
TIP
See the May 15th SpaceWeather . com page regarding El Niño and the Terminator.
Click on the active link: a magnetic event
Question being is the forthcoming solar cycle going to be large or small and will it kick-start an El Niño.
“No one knows how the sun exerts control over the ENSO. Most researchers favor “top-down” models: Solar activity alters the top of Earth’s atmosphere, making changes that percolate down to affect the weather we experience near Earth’s surface. But the actual mechanism is unknown.”
Someone does know how the sun controls ENSO, me, I understand the actual mechanism. The stated model is hugely misleading. Bob Leamon and I talked briefly at my 2022 NASA Sun-Climate Symposium poster in Tucson about what I expected to follow the solar cycle 24 Terminator.
The 2023 El Niño immediately followed the last solar cycle Terminator, as I predicted in 2022.
Another El Niño right about on time 3 years later in 2026 would be just a formality at this point.
Bob Leamon predicted at the meeting a very high sunspot maximum for this cycle that wasn’t reached, however he did say at the meeting this cycle would be one of the most energetic (EUV) in the instrumental record, which it was.
… in
TucsonMadison.The world is not now the same as it was in 1877.
If a “super” El Niño happens let’s call it “interesting times” and respond with all the modern technology available. For example, there were no airplanes nor Garmin Inreachs in 1877. 🙂
No air con either…
within the next 70 years it will kill billions. laugh it up
I can guarantee you that billions of people will die within the next 70 years.
In fact, a large proportion of people alive today, will not be alive in 70 years’ time.
Funny how the message “may kill” is propated like it “WILL kill you for shure”. Further coincidence that those subject to death will die the one or the other way. At the end death is all around us on a daily basis, so does it really care when where and why it hits us?
Further note on the side, aren’t those death scaremongers not the same idiots who constantly bitch about overpopulation?
klimata.org shows we are just entering El Niño territory.
The SOI has been consistently negative for a while now, with the 90 day running mean at last dropping below zero on May 14. The Kelvin Wave and subsurface equatorial Pacific SSTs look pretty impressive right now. The trade winds and upwelling off of South America are following suit.
Whatever happened to the ENSO meter on this site?
I didn’t know they had Lamborghinis in 1877.
The Maya civilisation at Yucatan collapsed after prolonged droughts of the 10th century.
This is the latest con job being pushed unusually hard. Access to public and number of ad buys are the only interesting aspects of it, along with the presumption of an ignorant audience.
The opinion piece (not news) in question was written by Joe Wilkins, a self-described music major living in sin with his girlfriend and a cat. He says he spends his time hunched over a beer talking with other worthless arts majors because they’re all too stupid to get a real job.
Even worse, some editor of some publishing or news outlet was stupid enough to publish this young snot’s nonsense.
The boring fearmongering messaging has gotten old as their stupid climate cult narrative exposes their mental problems as they continue to promote twilight Zone fantasies.
Meanwhile don’t forget that all the previous strong El-Nino effects didn’t destroy us as most of the effects were positive….
Grok claims “Far more people live in areas with extreme heat than extreme cold.” If heat is so dangerous to man, why does he prefer it?
Because he’s trying to find again the conditions he enjoyed inside the womb?
So, El Nino has nuclear and biological weapons and ain’t afraid to use them. Got it, climatards.
So, we are to believe that 1850-1880 was the optimum climate and everything since then was bad.
So, we are to believe that El Nino in 1877 being the worst on record has not reappeared in the last 150 years even with the planet threatening increases in atmospheric CO2?
El Nino is caused by CO2?
Where is the correlation?
Where is the attribution?
Seems the “climate scientists” have been falling down on the job for the past century and a half.