The Great Drought and Global Famine.

• Position: THE ENVIRONMENT

The most-thorough analysis yet of the Great Drought--the most devastating known drought of the past 800 years--and how it led to the Global Famine, an unprecedented disaster that took 50,000,000 lives, has been completed by a Washington State University researcher. Deepti Singh, assistant professor in the School of the Environment, warns that the Earth's current warming climate could make a similar drought even worse.

She used tree-ring data, rainfall records, and climate reconstructions to characterize the conditions leading up to the Great Drought, a period of widespread crop failures in Asia, Brazil, and Africa from 1875-78.

"Climate conditions that caused the Great Drought and Global Famine arose from natural variability, and their recurrence--with hydrological impacts intensified by global warming--could again potentially undermine global food security," she and her colleagues write in the Journal of Climate.

The Global Famine is among the worst humanitarian disasters in history, comparable to the influenza epidemic of 1918-19, World War I, or World War II. As an environmental disaster, it has few rivals. Making matters worse were social conditions, like British colonialists hoarding and exporting grain from India. Some populations were particularly vulnerable to disease and colonial expansion afterwards.

"In a very real sense, the El Nino and climate events of 1876-78 helped create the global inequalities that later would be characterized as 'first' and third' worlds," writes Singh, who was inspired by Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (2000), a book that details the social impact of the Great Drought and subsequent droughts in 1896-97 and 1899-1902. Its author, Mike Davis, is a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California, Riverside, and a coauthor on Singh's paper.

Despite its impact, few studies have characterized the dynamics of the drought, and Singh's work entails the first global-scale analysis of climatic conditions at the time. The researchers took multiple sources of data...