When harvests failed across Ethiopia in the early 1970s, a schoolboy named Adugna Woyessa watched his classroom be converted into a grain store for desperate farmers. He did not know then that the same invisible force drying out his country's fields was simultaneously collapsing Peru's anchovy fishery — the largest in the world — by warming Pacific waters beyond the point fish could tolerate. Scientists were only beginning to understand that El Niño, a name given by Pacific fishers in the 1800s, was not a regional curiosity but a planetary mechanism capable of rewriting harvests, triggering coups, and spreading disease across multiple continents at once. The 1972–73 El Niño was severe enough to prompt the first scientific forecast of the phenomenon the following year.

It brought brutal drought to south Asia, the Sahel, and parts of east Africa, arriving just as an oil crisis was already tightening food supplies worldwide. In Ethiopia, the famine that followed eroded confidence in Emperor Haile Selassie so completely that public protests helped enable a military coup, which installed a communist dictatorship. A single climatic event had, in effect, helped redraw a country's political map. Woyessa grew up to become an epidemiologist at the Ethiopian Public Health Institute, where he has spent his career studying El Niño's effects on malaria epidemics.

A decade after that first childhood drought, a stronger El Niño struck in 1982–83, forcing some of his high-school classmates to travel 150 kilometres to work state farms.