She connects dots between climatic events and famine amid rising global temperatures The world’s most catastrophic drought and subsequently deadly famine of the last 800 years was less than a century and a half ago.
“The book talks about famine and social-political factors — mostly the causes and consequences of the famine; we got interested in the role of climate conditions in causing this famine,” Singh said.
Understanding that information will help scientists eventually predict the when and how of severe future droughts of such widespread and prolonged endurance, she said.
What’s more, they’ll be able to understand how those droughts impact societies and their effects on the global food supply.
They began research that led to the Oct. 4 publication of a paper in the Journal of Climate, completing work that Singh had continued working on after arriving at WSU Vancouver in June.
But El Niño, even an extremely powerful one, cannot affect the entire globe.
However, in 1876 through 1878, that extremely powerful El Niño occurred just as two other extreme climatic events took place, collectively creating the conditions for global starvation.
The same three conditions actually have happened again in the same way as the Great Drought, in 1997 through 1998, but not to the same level of severity.
While the much of the rest of the world —Australia, Brazil, North Africa, Southeast Asia — were in the grips of a dire drought in the late 1870s, the Pacific Northwest was immersed in an extremely wet period.
If history is any teacher, it could be severe.

Scientists link California droughts, floods to distinctive atmospheric waves.
"This wave pattern is a global dynamic system that sometimes makes droughts or floods in California more likely to occur," said NCAR scientist Haiyan Teng, lead author of the California paper.
The California study was published in the Journal of Climate while the comprehensive study into the wave patterns is appearing in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences.
When they do, the result can be persistent weather patterns that often lead to droughts, floods, and heat waves.
The different windows into the atmosphere and precipitation patterns revealed that the formation of a ridge by the California coast is associated with the emergence of the distinctive wavenumber-5 pattern, which guides rain-producing low-pressure systems so that they travel well north of California.
Clues to seasonal weather patterns Forecasters who predict seasonal weather patterns have largely looked to shifting sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific, especially changes associated with El Niño and La Niña.
First, however, scientists need to better understand why and when the wave pattern emerges.
In the paper published in Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Branstator and Teng explored the physics of the wave pattern.
Using a simplified computer model of the climate system to identify the essential physical processes, the pair found that wavenumber-5 forms when strong jet streams act as wave guides, tightening the otherwise meandering Rossby wave into the signature configuration of five highs and five lows.
"The jets act to focus the energy," Branstator said.