Key findings

1. Why this paper exists

Every few months a headline warns that the worst weather disaster in history is about to repeat. This time the peg is 1877. The article that landed in our inbox draws a straight line from the 1877 to 1878 super El Niño, which helped trigger famines in India, Brazil and China that killed somewhere north of 50 million people, to a new event building in the Pacific right now. It is a frightening story and it is told well.

We have two jobs. First, check whether the ocean really is doing what the article says. Second, check whether 1877 is a fair comparison, because a scary historical analogue is only useful if the two situations actually line up. We are sceptical by habit on this site, but sceptical cuts both ways. We are sceptical of the doom headline, and we are sceptical of the comfortable idea that it cannot happen here. The data gets to settle it.

One more thing up front. The site owner leans toward big floods for the 2026 to 2027 season in southeast Queensland. That is a real position and we test it honestly in section 8. It is not the base case on current evidence, but it is not silly either, and there is a specific path by which it comes true.

2. The ocean right now: the event has already arrived

Start with what is measured, not modelled. As of mid June 2026 the tropical Pacific has crossed into El Niño. The Bureau of Meteorology relative Niño3.4 index for the week ending 14 June 2026 read +0.92°C, above the Bureau's +0.80°C El Niño threshold (Bureau of Meteorology, 2026). On 11 June 2026 NOAA's Climate Prediction Centre issued a formal El Niño Advisory (NOAA Climate Prediction Center, 2026). This is not a watch or an alert. It is a declared event.

How big might it get. The European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts ensemble puts the median peak at about +3°C in the Niño3.4 region by December 2026, with high end members near +4°C. NOAA calculates a 63 per cent chance the event reaches "super" strength, which forecasters define loosely as a peak of at least +2°C (NOAA Climate Prediction Center, 2026; ECMWF, 2026). To put +3°C in context, the strongest event of the satellite era was 2015 to 2016 at +2.6°C. So the models are pointing at something that would, if it verifies, be the strongest in modern instrumental memory.

We flag the obvious caveat. A median forecast of +3°C in June is a projection, not a measurement. The peak is five to six months out and the spread is wide. But the direction is not in doubt and the present value is already over the line. On the question "is a super El Niño building", the article is right, and so it would be dishonest of us to pretend otherwise. The interesting argument is not whether the event is real. It is whether 2026 is 1877, and what either means for a small town in the D'Aguilar foothills.

3. What El Niño actually does to Australia

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation is the dominant driver of year to year rainfall swings across eastern Australia. During El Niño the Pacific trade winds weaken, warm water spreads east, and the rising air and rain that would normally sit over the western Pacific near Australia shifts away to the central Pacific. The result for us is a drier than average tendency, strongest in winter and spring (Trenberth, 1997; Power et al., 2006).

The link is one of the cleaner signals in the Australian record. Nine of the ten driest winter to spring periods on record for eastern Australia happened in El Niño years, and in the Murray-Darling Basin winter to spring rainfall averaged across all El Niño events since 1900 ran about 28 per cent below the long term mean (Bureau of Meteorology, 2024). The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report states with high confidence that ENSO drives matched rainfall changes across southeast Australia, with El Niño phases tied to rainfall deficits and drought onset (IPCC, 2021).

Two honest qualifications. The link is a tendency, not a guarantee. The 1997 to 1998 event, one of the two strongest on record before 2026, delivered above average spring rainfall to parts of southern Queensland. And El Niño never acts alone. The Indian Ocean Dipole, covered in section 7, often matters more for the south and east than the Pacific does. Keep both in mind.

4. The sunspot test: was 1877 a quiet sun or a busy one?

Here is where the 1877 comparison starts to wobble, and where the long range forecasting tradition this site follows earns its place. The claim worth testing is the one attributed to the Inigo Jones school of thought: that high sunspot activity argues against a long, grinding drought. So the first question is simple. What were the sunspots doing in 1877, and what are they doing now?

We pulled the numbers straight from the official sunspot record, the SILSO version 2 daily series, which covers both periods. These are calculated yearly means of the daily sunspot number:

Source: SILSO World Data Center, sunspot number series, version 2.0 (Royal Observatory of Belgium). Yearly means calculated by Dayboro Weather Research from the daily file.

The result is stark. The 1877 to 1878 super El Niño, the worst on record, happened right on top of a deep solar minimum. Sunspots were scarce, around 21 in 1877 and under 6 the next year. The year 2024 ran near 155, roughly seven to eight times higher. On the sun, 1877 and 2026 are not similar. They are close to opposite.

Now the part that matters for the Inigo Jones claim, because it is more subtle than the slogan version. Jones's own written position, in his original works, was that droughts in eastern Australia tended to line up with sunspot minima, not maxima (Jones, 1935, as reproduced in the Dayboro research library). In other words, low sun, more drought. High sun, less drought tendency. 1877 fits that rule perfectly: low sunspots, brutal drought. And 2026, with high sunspots, sits in the part of the cycle Jones associated with a lower drought tendency. So the modern slogan, that high sunspots argue against a long drought, is actually a fair shorthand for what Jones himself wrote. The data does not refute it. It is the El Niño that has, for now, overridden it.

That is the real tension of 2026, and we are waiting on the next few months to see which driver wins. The Pacific is shouting drought. The solar cycle, read through the Jones lens, is leaning the other way. They do not have to agree, and right now they do not.

5. The planetary test: are 1877 and 2026 the same configuration?

The Inigo Jones method, and the broader astronomical cycle tradition, holds that the outer planets modulate the sun and therefore the long climate rhythms. We do not need to settle whether that mechanism is real to run the test. If you believe the planetary configuration carries information, then the honest question is whether 1877 and 2026 share a configuration. If they do not, the 1877 analogue is weak on its own terms.

We computed the heliocentric positions of the four outer planets for both years using a standard ephemeris. The zodiacal positions, taken at 1 September of each year, are:

Heliocentric ecliptic longitudes calculated by Dayboro Weather Research using the PyEphem ephemeris, epoch 1 September of each year.

Indeed every single outer planet is in a different sign. The Jupiter to Saturn angular separation, the heart of the roughly twenty year "great conjunction" cycle that Jones leaned on, was about 67 to 75 degrees in 1877 and about 116 to 123 degrees in 2026. The two years sit at different points of that cycle entirely: 1877 fell roughly sixteen years after the 1861 great conjunction, while 2026 falls only about six years after the 2020 one. On any reading of the planetary cycles, 1877 is not a template for 2026.

So the cycle tradition, taken seriously, argues against the 1877 scare rather than for it. If 2026 were a planetary echo of 1877 you would expect the configuration to rhyme. It does not. This is the strongest single point in favour of the wetter, less alarmist reading, and it comes from exactly the framework the doom comparison ignores.

6. What 1877 actually did, and why it was so bad

On this moment it is worth being precise about 1877 itself, because the lesson is not the one the headline draws. Australia did suffer severe drought across the east in 1877. That part is real. But the global catastrophe of 1877 to 1878 was not the work of El Niño on its own. The published reconstruction points to a rare four way stack: a preceding run of cool Pacific years from 1870 to 1876, the record El Niño of 1877 to 1878, a record strong positive Indian Ocean Dipole in 1877, and a record warm North Atlantic in 1878 (Singh et al., 2018, as summarised in the ENSO literature; Brugnara et al., 2023).

The Indian Ocean Dipole is the part that gets left out of the scary version, and it is the part that matters most for us. The thermal contrast across the Indian Ocean in 1877 was the strongest recorded before or since, and that is a large reason the drought bit so hard across Australia and southern Africa. El Niño set the stage. The Dipole pulled the trigger.

We owe readers one honest limitation here. We do not have a Dayboro rain gauge from 1877. The town's instrumental record in our own library is modern. So the 1877 Australian picture in this paper comes from the published science and the long eastern Australia reconstructions, not from a local reading at Station 040241. That does not weaken the conclusion, but you should know where the number comes from.

7. The Indian Ocean Dipole: the real swing factor for 2026

If 1877 teaches anything for 2026, it is to watch the Dipole, not just the Pacific. A positive Indian Ocean Dipole warms the water off east Africa and cools the water off northwest Australia, which chokes off the moisture that would otherwise feed into southeast Australia. Stack a positive Dipole on top of an El Niño and the drying comes from two directions at once. That is the 1877 mechanism, and it is also what drove the catastrophic 2019 to 2020 fire season, which happened in a neutral Pacific but a strongly positive Dipole (IPCC, 2021; CSIRO, 2023).

Here is the live number that the doom version skips. As of 14 June 2026 the Dipole index sat at −0.13°C, which is neutral. Models favour a positive Dipole developing through the southern winter and spring, but it has not happened yet (Bureau of Meteorology, 2026). This is the fork in the road. If a strong positive Dipole develops, 2026 starts to rhyme with 1877 in the way that counts, and the drought and fire risk for the D'Aguilar hinterland climbs steeply. If the Dipole stays neutral or turns negative, the El Niño drying is partly offset for the south and east, and a much milder season is on the table.

For Dayboro residents and landholders, the Dipole state from about July 2026 onward is the single most useful thing to monitor. It will tell you more about your spring and summer than the El Niño headline ever will.

8. The flood case: is a wet 2026 to 2027 still possible?

Now to the contrarian read, stated plainly so you can judge it. The site owner leans toward big floods for the 2026 to 2027 season. On the base case evidence, a strong to super El Niño building through winter argues against that. A classic strong El Niño summer tends to suppress, not boost, the wet season rains that produce flooding in southeast Queensland. We will not pretend the odds favour floods. They do not, right now.

But there is a real path to a wet summer, and it is worth naming because it is plausible rather than wishful. El Niño events vary in length. A shorter event of nine to twelve months can break down and swing back toward neutral or even La Niña conditions by late 2026. If that happens before the summer monsoon, the suppressing influence lifts at exactly the moment our wet season starts, and a wet, even flooding, summer becomes possible. The solar cycle adds weight to this path. As section 4 showed, 2026 sits in the high sunspot, lower drought tendency part of the cycle on the Jones rule, and the planetary configuration of section 5 looks nothing like 1877. Possibly, then, the cycle drivers and a short Pacific event combine to deliver the opposite of the headline.

We rate this as the secondary scenario, not the base case. The honest framing is a fork. Path one, the base case: the El Niño holds, a positive Dipole develops, and Dayboro faces a dry, hot, fire prone spring and a late or weak wet season. Path two, the contrarian case: the El Niño is short, the Dipole stays quiet, the event collapses before summer, and the 2026 to 2027 wet season runs wet or very wet. Both are live. The data over July to October will decide which one we are in, and the Dipole is the tell.

One note on the wheat point sometimes raised alongside this argument, that falling wheat prices prove the drought scare is overdone. It is half true. The 2025 to 2026 season average United States farm price did fall to around five dollars a bushel, on the back of abundant global supply. But the United States Department of Agriculture forecasts the 2026 to 2027 price rising to about six dollars fifty as supply tightens, with global production down on the prior record and around 40 per cent of United States winter wheat rated poor on drought and freeze damage (United States Department of Agriculture, 2026). So falling wheat described the recent past, a supply glut, not a forward all clear on drought. Use it carefully.

9. What this means for Dayboro

Dayboro sits in the foothills of the D'Aguilar Range, about 45 kilometres northwest of Brisbane, on roughly 1,100 millimetres of rain a year that falls mostly in summer (Bureau of Meteorology, Station 040241). The town's North Pine and South Pine sub catchments feed North Pine Dam, which supplies the northern parts of greater Brisbane. That makes local rainfall in the ranges a water supply question, not just a garden one.

Three consecutive La Niña years from 2022 to early 2025 left heavy grass and scrub growth across properties, park boundaries and road corridors. That fuel load is the main fire risk heading into any drying. Under the base case, a dry hot spring would cure those fuels early, and September and October 2026 could bring elevated fire danger across the foothills, especially if a positive Dipole develops. Under the contrarian case, a short El Niño and a wet summer would flip the risk from fire to flood, with the creeks and crossings that Dayboro knows well back in play.

The practical reading is that this is a preparation window, not a prediction to bank on. The autumn and early winter are the time to manage fuel, fill tanks and check pumps, regardless of which path verifies, because both paths start with the same sensible steps. From July, watch the Dipole and the Bureau's ENSO updates, and let the ocean tell you which season you are actually getting.

10. The part that should actually worry you: food, not weather

The news.com.au article makes a wider claim, and on this one it has a point worth taking seriously, even if it wraps it in a lot of doom. Its argument is that 1877 did not kill 50 million people because the weather was bad. It killed them because the systems that should have carried people through a bad year had been hollowed out. The Journal of Climate authors quoted in the piece say it plainly: the triggers were acute droughts, but it was the neglect or destruction of traditional grain and water storage that turned crop failure into mass death. The drought was the match. The broken food system was the petrol.

That distinction is the whole game, and it is why we are not panicking about a repeat of the body count. There have only been a small handful of super El Niños in the modern record, three since 1950 on the strict measure of a peak above two degrees, in 1982 to 1983, 1997 to 1998, and 2015 to 2016. Not one of them produced anything like 1877. The ocean was comparable. The outcome was not, because the world that received the shock was not a colonial subsistence economy with its grain stores stripped out.

So far, so reassuring. Here is the part that is not. The modern food system has swapped one fragility for another. We do not store much anymore. Eight billion people are fed by a "just in time" network where ships and trucks arrive on schedule and the shelves refill overnight, and it works beautifully right up until several things go wrong at once. The article stacks up the things currently going wrong: war in eastern Europe and the Middle East, fertiliser and diesel prices pushed around by trade chokepoints, critical minerals used as bargaining chips. We cannot independently verify every analyst quote in that piece, and some of it reads as worst case storytelling. But the underlying point, that a low inventory system is brittle when shocks arrive together rather than one at a time, is sound and well understood.

This is where Dayboro has an advantage the article never imagines, because the answer to a brittle global supply chain is not to refresh the news feed. It is to grow some of your own. A backyard bed, a few fruit trees, a chook pen and a working rainwater tank do not depend on the Strait of Hormuz. They are the modern version of the grain store that 1877 had stripped away. You do not need to go off grid or grow everything. Even shifting the staples you eat most onto your own block takes the supermarket out of the loop for the items most exposed to a price shock. This is the whole idea behind our sister site GardenBuddy, which tracks what every vegetable actually costs at the supermarket and tells you what is worth growing instead for your climate zone. In a year when a strong El Niño is bearing down on the eastern states and prices for anything grown in a drought zone are likely to climb, that is not a hobby. It is insurance you can eat.

There is a second half to resilience that one backyard cannot manage on its own, and it is the half that 1877 actually proves. A single household with a bed of silverbeet is better off than one without. A whole street that grows, swaps and shares is in a different league again. One gardener ends up with too much zucchini and not enough eggs, the neighbour three doors down has the opposite problem, and the moment they can find each other the small surpluses start covering the small shortfalls. That is the village grain store rebuilt, just spread across a postcode instead of held in one shed. It is also exactly what got hollowed out before 1877, the local systems that carried people through a bad year. Our community site LocalBuddy exists to put that layer back, a place to connect your neighbourhood, run a local swap, trade a glut of tomatoes for a dozen eggs, and build the kind of local network that does not show up on a supply chain map but matters more than one when the trucks are late. Grow your own with GardenBuddy, then trade and share the surplus through LocalBuddy. Together they are a small town doing for itself what a brittle global system cannot be trusted to do for it.

None of this is a forecast of famine for Australia. We are a wealthy food exporting country and we are not 1877 India. It is a nudge. The cheapest, most reliable hedge against a bad season and a jumpy global market is the bed in your own backyard, and the best time to dig it is the cool autumn and winter window we are in right now, before any drying takes hold.

11. Conclusion

So is this 1877 again? On the Pacific, the warning has teeth. A strong to super El Niño is present and building, and the models are not bluffing. On everything else, the comparison falls apart. The sun in 1877 was quiet and in 2026 it is loud. The planets sat in a configuration in 1877 that 2026 does not share. And the real engine of the 1877 disaster, a record Indian Ocean Dipole stacked on the El Niño, has not yet shown up in 2026. On top of that, the three super events since 1950 that did match 1877 in the ocean caused no comparable disaster, because the killer in 1877 was a broken food system, not the warm water itself.

The verdict is a split one, and we will not pretend it is cleaner than it is. The drought lean is real and it is the base case. The wetter path is a genuine secondary scenario, supported by the cycle drivers and alive if the El Niño is short and the Dipole stays quiet. The single variable that decides between them is the Indian Ocean Dipole from July onward. Watch that, not the headline.

What we can say without hedging is this. The doom comparison to 1877 is built on the one measure that matches, the ocean, and ignores the three that do not, the sun, the planets and the Dipole. That is not analysis. It is a scary number wearing a history costume. The honest picture is more interesting, and more useful, than either the doom headline or the comfortable dismissal.

And the one thing worth doing regardless of which way the season breaks costs nothing but a weekend. Whether 2026 to 2027 turns dry and hot or short and wet, a backyard that grows some of its own food and catches its own water is the household that does not flinch when the supermarket price of a drought grown vegetable doubles. That is the real lesson of 1877, stripped of the horror movie framing. Resilience was never about predicting the weather. It was about not being at the mercy of it.

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References