The Great Famine of the 21st Century

A cautionary tale of our future climate

 

The year is 2078. It is year three of a devastating drought, famine, and extreme heat event around the globe. In the last three years, some two million people have perished. It has already been called the most deadly environmental disaster to ever befall humanity.

It started with the worst drought in more than 800 years. First, there was the La Niña of 2076, which brought dry conditions to the southern United States, Mexico, and India. Then a particularly strong El Niño, in which warm winds blew warm waters west along the Equator for a record 18 months — longer than even the 1998 and 2016 El Niño events. This caused a cold-water upwelling off the coast of Peru that was like winding up a rubber band that snapped in 2077.

You may not have heard of the Indian Ocean Dipole — a temperature oscillation related to and influenced by the Pacific oscillation that causes the El Niño. In 2077, the thermal contrast between the two halves of the Indian Ocean was the strongest ever recorded. This led to dry conditions in Australia and South Africa.

In the North Atlantic, another storm was brewing. In 2077, the north Atlantic was the warmest it has ever been — far warmer than the moderate temperatures measured back in the mid-2020s. This dragged moist air northward, parching a large part of Northern Brazil.

In 2077, these three major ocean oscillations all coincided at once to create the hottest, driest conditions ever recorded in India, China, Australia, and South America.

An unprecedented death toll

As if we hadn’t been warned. Yet it still happened. In India, crops began to fail across the entire southern half of the subcontinent. Then, it spread to the north, and by the end of 2078, a million people in India were dead.

In China, the most lethal drought-famine in that country’s history struck the five northern provinces of Shandong, Zhili, Shanxi, Henan, and Shaanxi, leaving hundreds of thousands dead. The heat wave spared no one in the Yellow River basin — adults, children, and animals all perished.

In Brazil, the Northeast grazing lands called the sertão practically emptied out, leaving more than 100,000 bodies before the rains returned.

Around the world, more than 2 million people died in those three years.

Could this have been prevented?

You’d think so. You’d think people would have listened. You’d think we could have transitioned from fossil fuels in time to prevent one of the worst disasters of human history.

But you would be wrong.

Because this worldwide heat wave and famine already happened back in 1876–78. Everything I just described took place in the 19th century, long before humans started emitting much CO2. Everything I described is accurate. I just added 200 years to the dates to get your attention.

I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear. I know it isn’t what you’ve been told. It’s important for some people to believe in a bleak future, but here is the data:

 

You might think: “Of course, we now have fossil fuels to protect us from the elements, so many fewer people would die today from the same heat wave.” And that’s true. But 3 million is a lot of people. Temperatures must have been extreme around the globe to kill that many. Jennifer Marohasy has written about temperatures in Australia, showing this graph from the Bourke post office:

 
 

In fact, India was plagued by famines in those years, a combination of high temperatures and British resource mismanagement. The temperatures weren’t the result of industrialization, they were the result of increased energy coming from the sun, which ended the Little Ice Age and began our current climate regime.

Curiously, Wikipedia lists the event as a drought and famine, not as a heat wave. It has been called one of the deadliest natural disasters in history. My information comes mostly from a gated paper by researcher Roland Lardinois. I asked him to send it to me, and he did. The facts above are from his account and others. According to Lardinois:

The deaths in the Madras Presidency which are close to the average between 1871 and 1874 increase by 25 per cent to 30 per cent between 1875 and 1876; they are multiplied by 3 in 1877 and record a further increase of 60 per cent in 1878 before coming down considerably in the subsequent years. But the mortality crisis that extends over three years for the whole of the Madras Presidency lasts only for one year, 1877, in the State of Mysore, the heart of the famine.

There was tremendous mismanagement of resources. Grain prices tripled in 1877 and doubled in 1888. Cholera and small pox were endemic. The famine struck India in 1876. For 1877 and 1878, the death rates skyrocketed, while birth rates plummeted. Looking at Lardinois’ paper, I estimate India lost about 2 million people in those two years — about a million more than would have died ordinarily. When looking at deaths due to some cause, you have to subtract out the normal death rate for those years.

The Columbia climate school reports:

The team’s findings suggest that the 1876–78 droughts extended far beyond Brazil, India, and China, although that’s where famine struck the hardest. The search turned up evidence for dry conditions in Egypt, Morocco, Australia and even southwestern and eastern North America. Tree rings suggested Asia’s drought was the worst in 800 years or more.

According to many reports, more than 30 million people died in those three years, and another 20 million died of knock-on effects over the following decade. I don’t believe those numbers. According to Wikipedia, it was 5.6–9.6 million deaths. But I suspect those numbers don’t subtract out the normal background rate.

Based on Lardinois’ research, I estimate a more realistic 2 million global extra deaths for those two years, and very likely another million in the years afterward — mostly a result of disease and continued oppression by colonial assholes. Probably not fewer than 2 million, possibly many more, but I can’t find any serious sources to substantiate a higher number. I’m basing my global number on the accurate statistics kept by Indian and British demographers. I will be happy if any reader can show me a more accurate number.

The true tragedy

The problem isn’t the future. The problem isn’t CO2. The problem is what we’re doing right now. Today, humans spend more than $1 trillion every year on decarbonization, which will most likely have no measurable effect on our future climate. But it does raise the price of energy, and the current virtue-signaling environment prevents people in the developing world from reaching the standard of living we take for granted. If they don’t reach the standard of living we had in the 1950s, they will continue to burn wood and dung for fuel, threatening their own health and the very existence of the forests.

Today, life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa is 60 years — the same as it was in the United States in 1935. Today, about 60 percent of sub-Saharan people are farmers — the same as in the US in 1860. About 500 million people in Africa live in extreme poverty. According to the World Bank, half the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have poverty rates higher than 35%.

And yet, that same World Bank won’t lend them money to build a reliable energy grid. The United Nations and the World Economic Forum are forcing Africans to install solar and wind projects that can’t help them cook dinner, so they continue to burn trees, charcoal, and dung, destroying forests and dying of lung diseases. They are — right now — being forced to live lives we lived in 1850.

Yes, you say, but prices of solar panels are coming down! Imagine you have a car that drives really well whenever the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. No batteries, nothing, it just works. It’s not even that expensive, and it is magically zero emission. Now, can you get rid of your regular car? You might think you could just rent or use an Uber when the sun isn’t shining, but that’s exactly when everyone else needs a car, too, so you actually have to maintain your existing car, pay the insurance, make sure it’s always available, for those fairly frequent times when your renewable car isn’t possible and the Uber is taken. That’s twice as many cars, no matter who owns them. That’s twice the resources, and many more times the precious metals.

That’s not “sustainability.”

People in the developing world don’t need wind farms and solar panels; they need access to cheap, reliable energy, like the people of China, France, and the US have. Ultimately, they need nuclear power. That is how they get out of poverty and live more fulfilling, prosperous, longer lives. Affordable energy gives us clean water. Affordable energy keeps schools open. You can’t run a hospital or even a highway without affordable dispatchable, always-on electricity. Instead, we turn a blind eye on the child and slave labor needed to mine the necessary minerals for our wind turbines and solar panels while denying them a single coal plant so they can have light to read by.

The people of Africa are are caught in a trap of Western self-righteous green policies and beliefs that we’re in the middle of a climate emergency. All so people in Europe and the US can feel good about a set of invisible problems that don’t exist. This isn’t a plan to save the world; it’s a plan to keep Africa poor. Are the environmental impacts and human atrocities really worth an EV battery?

Energy Poverty

Not just Africa, but poor people around the world have been hit very hard by rising energy prices as a result of poor policy. This is called energy poverty — forcing poor families to choose between food and heating, medicines and electricity. It’s happening right now, and it’s killing millions every year. Hans Rosling makes the case clearly:

 

As fuel prices rise due to poor policy, war, greenwashing, and virtue-signaling, the UK government estimates there are now more than 6 million in energy poverty; in the US it’s 16 percent of households, in Europe it’s 50–125 million people; and in Asia it’s about 1.2 billion. All of these figures are from before 2022. The cost of decarbonization is very high. It is measured in hundreds of millions of lives and in trillions of dollars (see elsewhere on this site to learn more about energy poverty).

So if climate change threatens life on earth, if an apocalypse is truly coming, if all our lives are threatened, then you should be willing to buy and wear this t-shirt:

 

What? You’re not willing to wear that t-shirt? You thought 97 percent of climate scientists agree we are in a climate emergency? Are you sure? Are you willing to read what a Cal Tech physicist has written about the IPCC and its models of the future? Or an MIT professor who was once part of the IPCC? Or a professor of physics at Princeton?

You’d better be very sure you are right, because the cost of self-righteousness today is enormous. Decades of bad energy policy have led us to a much more fragile world, more threatened environment, insane energy prices, and doing much more harm to poor people right now than we need to. We need energy policy based on science, not myths and shared delusions.

 

Summary

As you have just learned, we live in the safest century to be alive. We are more protected against natural disasters than ever. And we are being lied to about CO2 and climate.

This isn’t easy for a lot of people to hear. It has become a matter of tribal and political identity. I know. In 1991, I wrote a book about how CO2 was changing the climate. But then I dug deeper and realized not everything was as it seemed. When I started to tell others the science wasn’t settled, I lost quite a few friends. If you have read this far, thank you for being brave.

What to do? Educate yourself. Use the resources of this website to remodel your concept of what’s fair and right and what is worth doing with your time and energy. Tell others. Engage in conversations. Remember that the opposite of skepticism is gullibility. Ask questions. Don’t believe the “consensus.” Learn for yourself.

Resources

Wikipedia article on the Great Famine of 1876

A partial explanation of the ocean oscillations that caused the Great Famine of 1876

Climate and the Global Famine of 1876–78

How the British Empire exacerbated a rare climate event.

How the event was covered up (warning: very graphic images) …