More than 50 million people were killed between 1875 and 1878.
The period is now remembered as the Great Famine.
And one of the primary causes behind the famine was a naturally occurring phenomenon called El Niño.
In fact, the 1877 El Niño is the strongest ever recorded.
As of June, we have entered another El Niño event.
And scientists are expecting this one to be very strong.
Some call it a super El Niño or even a Godzilla El Niño.
So are we better prepared in 2026?
There are, after all, five times as many people as in 1877
and the planet is 1.4 degrees Celsius hotter.
This is Zero. I am Akshat Rathi.
This week, understanding a monster.
Since 1970, our appetite for fossil fuels has been increasing global average temperatures by about 0.2 degrees Celsius every decade.
That is typically how much a single El Niño event raises global average temperatures.
And it does so by releasing vast amounts of heat from the Pacific Ocean.
So this El Niño will not just cause disasters around the world,
but it will also give us a taste of what climate change could look like in 2035
if we continue to burn fossil fuels at the same rate.
To understand the El Niño phenomenon, I am joined today by Mingfang Ting,
professor of climate at Columbia University.