Climate Change and the Health of Nations by Anthony McMichael

Author:Anthony McMichael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

In the latter half of the 1780s, there were long droughts in Mexico, southern Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia. During 1785–1786, Mexico experienced a severe famine, recalled as the Year of Hunger and described as “the most disastrous single event in the whole history of colonial maize agriculture.”104 In the Mexican city of Léon at that time there was a twelvefold increase in the price of corn (maize), a sixfold increase in the death rate, and a halving of the birth rate. Over the following 10 years, prolonged aridity and autumn frosts in Mexico led to persistent drought and famine conditions, culminating in wholesale failures of corn and wheat crops in the mid-1790s.105 The most severe droughts did not strike Mexico until 1793, indicating that the onset of full El Niño conditions there did not occur until more than two years after the same El Niño event had already caused serious monsoon failure in India—a reminder that the teleconnected impacts of these events are spread widely over both space and time.

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