







































 

   

Corresponding author(s)  

Eleanor Shaw, University of Manchester, eleanor.shaw@manchester.ac.uk 

Robert L. Naylor, University of Manchester, robert.naylor@manchester.ac.uk 

 

 

 

The 200-year Cycle: An Early Climate-based Reaction to the Crisis in the 

Sahel and its Uptake in 1973 

 

 

Robert L. Naylor and Eleanor Shaw1 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction 

During the 1970s, the status of climatic change was elevated from a niche pursuit within 

the physical sciences to an issue seen as worthy of public support, coalescing in the first World 

Climate Conference in 1979.2 The reasons for this are multifaceted and complex. Joshua Howe 

has highlighted charged debates regarding pollution from supersonic air travel as an early entry 

point for climate into the political arena in the late 1960s.3 Spencer Weart has argued that the 

rise of environmentalism as a respectable political force in the early 1970s permeated some 

sections of the scientific community, leading to environmental problems, including climatic 

change, becoming a more important part of scientific meetings and debates.4 Weart has also 

indicated that towards the end of the decade climate issues were utilised to promote the use of 

nuclear power—a tactic made more effective by successive oil shocks.5 As a final example, 

Naylor has shown how the panic surrounding the World Food Crisis of 1973-74, as prices of 

food and several other commodities skyrocketed, opened the political sphere to some 

climatologists to promote climatic change as the root cause of these problems. This influential 

minority of climatologists exploited the publicity surrounding several prominent climate-

 

1 The authors would like it to be known that they should be considered joint first authors. 

2 Here we define ‘climatic change’ as global long-term changes to the atmosphere irrespective of causal mechanism. 

3 Joshua P. Howe, Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming, 1st ed. (Seattle; London: University of 

Washington Press, 2014): 44–66. 

4 Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming: Revised and Expanded Edition, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard 

University Press, 2008): 66–67. 

5 Ibid, 102–103. 



 History of Meteorology 11 (2022) 

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related events in order to emphasise the climatic threat, including a famine in the Western Sahel 

at the turn of the 1970s.6 

Many of these contributing factors reflect the new discursive environment that took 

root during the decade. Eric Hobsbawm identifies the period of 1973 to 1991 as the ‘Crisis 

Decades’ of the twentieth century, with increased concern globally about economic, social, and 

environmental problems.7 Daniel T. Rogers has argued that as a result of these various crises, 

the 1970s became an age of fracture, where long held common ideas and concepts in society 

came apart.8 So-called stagflation, the World Food Crisis, oil shocks and the end of formal 

colonialism in many places were just some of the forms of economic fracture and political 

fragmentation that impacted the production and circulation of knowledge. Due to the desire to 

respond to and prevent these kinds of crises, the 1970s saw particular resonance afforded to 

predictions about the future.9 The desire on the part of American security actors, including the 

Ford Foundation, to not just predict but prevent apocalyptic futures hailed by movements such 

as environmentalism, produced the rise of future studies, a branch of futurology.10 Jon Agar 

argues that the ‘burgeoning interest in longer-term, futurological study’ made it possible for 

scientists to justify the importance of climatic change to the UK government.11 Rogers also 

identifies the period as one of contagion where, in the face of economic crisis and identity 

conflict, “versatile sets of ideas” moved through increasingly permeable disciplinary 

boundaries, reworked and reused for new occasions.12 Michael Egan uses Michael Soule’s term 

“crisis disciplines” to frame the response of scientists to the new challenges of the 1970s.13 

Egan argues that a section of the scientific community, faced with social challenges and the 

threat of ecological collapse, reformulated itself into a reactionary, adisciplinary, politically 

engaged, “acting before knowing all the facts” corpus. One of the intentions of these crisis 

disciplines was to “rehabilitate” science with an increasingly disparaging public by directly 

engaging with those issues deemed most pressing.  Crisis disciplines combined the increased 

appetite for predictions of the future, and the tendency to collapse disciplinary boundaries into 

a new set of academic practises. 

 

 

6 Robert L Naylor, “Reid Bryson: The Crisis Climatologist,” WIRES Climate Change, 2021, e744. In this paper we have 

primarily referred to the crisis in the Sahel in the early 1970s as a famine as this emphasises the impact on the people of the 

Sahel and the multifaceted causes, as opposed to the term drought that is understood in the popular imagination as a lack of 

rainfall. Controversy over several incidents of food insecurity have led to long-running discussions about the appropriate 

scales and definitions of famine. For more information: Paul Howe and Stephen Devereux, “Famine Intensity and Magnitude 

Scales: A Proposal for an Instrumental Definition of Famine,” Disasters 28, no. 4 (December 2004): 353–72. It should also 

be noted that the term ‘drought’ has a number of definitions, some of which have little to do with rainfall: Donald A. Wilhite 

and Michael H. Glantz, “Understanding: The Drought Phenomenon: The Role of Definitions,” Water International 10, no. 3 

(January 1985): 111–20. 

7 Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, repr (London: Abacus, 2011). 

8 Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). 

9 Locher, “Neo-Malthisian Environmentalism, World Fisheries Crisis, and the Global Commons, 1950s-1970s”; Jenny 

Andersson, “The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for the World,” The American Historical Review 117, no. 5 

(December 1, 2012): 1411–30. 

10 Andersson, “The Great Future Debate,” 1413. 

11 Jon Agar, “‘Future Forecast--Changeable and Probably Getting Worse’: The UK Government’s Early Response to 

Anthropogenic Climate Change,” Twentieth Century British History 26, no. 4 (December 1, 2015): 604-605. 

12 Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 11. 

13 Michael Egan, ‘Survival Science: Crisis Disciplines and the Shock of the Environment in the 1970s1’, Centaurus 59, no. 

1–2 (2017): 26–39. and Michael Soule, ‘What Is Conservation Biology?’, Bioscience 35, no. 11 (1985): 727–34. 

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Fig. 1.  Sahelian rainfall during the rainy season since 1900.14 

 

The Sahel famine of the early 1970s was one of the challenges that helped form crisis 

disciplines, especially in the area of climatology. As one of the first major crises in newly 

postcolonial Africa, the famine brought widespread food insecurity and significant mortality 

for people and their animals. It appears that before mid-1973 the crisis was not strongly linked 

to long-term climatic changes within the public sphere. For example, a Washington Post article 

from January 1973 explicitly pointed out that “[w]eather experts at the US Department of 

Agriculture say that despite appearances there is no worldwide drought and that some areas in 

the southern hemisphere had heavy rains last year”.15 This sentiment was echoed by aid 

workers on the ground, who later claimed that they had been slow in responding to the crisis 

due to a prevailing belief that the drought was a “temporary climatic aberration” and that “each 

year would be the last”.16 In early reports, the crisis was mostly framed by aid responses, with 

little mention of climatological aspects. By mid-1973 however the crisis became linked with 

worldwide climatic shifts, an ever-evolving framing that continues to hold considerable sway. 

The discursive environment of the 1970s, with an academic trend towards futurism across a 

number of disciplines, meant that explanations such as climate attribution narratives thrived. 

These explanations drew on older colonial conceptualisations of the Sahelian landscape and its 

peoples. However, while the representation of the Sahel famine as caused by climatic changes 

has been influential since mid-1973, this narrative has long been challenged from a variety of 

disciplinary perspectives.17 Many meteorologists have highlighted that data for the region is 

incomplete, and insufficient to make such confident causational assertions regarding the 

mechanisms behind the drought.18 Today, it has been proposed that the decrease in rainfall was 

 

14 Todd Mitchell, “Sahel Precipitation Index (DOI: 10.6069/H5MW2F2Q),” Dataset, The Joint Institute for the Study of the 

Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO), February 2018, http://jisao.washington.edu/data/sahel/. 

15 David B. Ottaway, “Drought Threatens Famine in Wide Areas of Africa,” The Washington Post, January 20, 1973. 

16 Hal Sheets and Roger Morris, “Disaster in the Desert,” Issue: A Journal of Opinion 4, no. 1 (1974): 29. 

17 These global scale climatic attribution theses were accompanied by discussion of localised climate-related mechanisms. 

Mike Hulme has shown how climatic perspectives of Sahelian desiccation have taken a number of guises since the crisis, 

with localised feedback loops between increasing surface albedo and decreasing rainfall becoming an important contributor 

to climate-based narratives in the mid-1970s, as well as more global-scale arguments: Mike Hulme, “Climatic Perspectives 

on Sahelian Desiccation: 1973-1998,” Global Environmental Change, 2001, 11. 

18 David Dalby and R. J. Harrison Church, eds., Drought in Africa: Report of the 1973 Symposium (Symposium on Drought 

in Africa, London: University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, Centre for African Studies, 1973), 14. The 

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caused by changes in ocean currents, but whether Sahelian regions can be expected to receive 

increased rainfall in the future and whether the recent rainfall levels represent an underlying 

pattern remains a matter of contention.19 

From the time of Western colonial conquest in the late-nineteenth century, the Sahel 

has been perceived as not just challenging but inherently problematic and dangerous due to its 

aridity.20 Colonial conceptions of the Sahel continue to inflect portrayals and perceptions of 

the region today, and were certainly visible in discussions of the famine in the 1970s. Davis 

and Burke identify the portrayal of the Sahel as degraded and environmentally unnatural as a 

form of “environmental orientalism”, the projection of ideas of exoticism and insufficiency 

onto environments perceived as other by Westerners.21  Related to these ideas about the 

landscape were racialised and gendered assumptions about its people, encapsulated in the 

concept of environmental determinism.22 The colonial powers justified their intervention in the 

region through these ideas.23 These perceptions were reflected in early forms of climate 

science, which were concerned with the survival of Europeans in hostile environmental 

conditions in the colonies.24 Colonial conceptions saw climate as fixed or static, and climate 

was identified as a causal factor in the Sahel’s perceived underdevelopment. Decolonisation 

coincided with an increasing recognition that climate was not static at all, but instead was 

subject to natural variation and possible anthropogenic influences, resulting in a shift in how 

climatological thinking was applied to the Sahel.25As the idea of climate as a fixed entity was 

replaced in the popular imaginary by the idea of climatic change, the Sahel was again framed 

as particularly vulnerable, and narratives of environmental determinism were again invoked,26 

even against opposition from scholars who strengthened the evidence for complex political, 

economic and social causes of the famine.27 The Drought in Africa symposium represents one 

of the earliest academic reactions to the Sahel famine, and therefore is a useful example to 

illustrate the continuities of colonial thought as climate imaginaries transitioned from static to 

dynamic. 

 

Western Sahel was formally colonised by France after the Berlin conference of 1884-1885, so there are substantial rainfall 

statistics for this region only since the beginning of the twentieth century (Fig. 1). It should also be noted that the Sahelian 

region sees significant variability in rainfall in different locations, so regional statistics obscure local experiences. 

19 Michela Biasutti, “Rainfall Trends in the African Sahel: Characteristics, Processes, and Causes,” WIREs Climate Change 

10, no. 4 (2019). 

20 Brittany Meché, “Bad Things Happen in the Desert: Mapping Security Regimes in the West African Sahel and the 

‘Problem’ of Arid Spaces.” In A Research Agenda for Military Geographies, p.71. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019 71 

21 Davis, Diana K., and Edmund Burke. Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa. Athens, Ohio, 

United States: Ohio University Press, 2011. 16 

22 As David Livingston notes, environmental determinism is commonly understood as the idea that “human activities are 

controlled by the environment”, and yet this definition is far too simple to contain the full scope of the way the idea has been 

constructed and utilised across many centuries. Here it is important to note that in the Sahel, the idea that the people were 

morally degraded as a result of living in the arid environment was widespread. David N Livingstone, ‘Environmental 

Determinism’, in The Sage Handbook of Geographical Knowledge (SAGE publications, 2011), 368–80. 

23 Davis and Burke, Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa, 15. 

24 Meché, “Bad Things Happen in the Desert: Mapping Security Regimes in the West African Sahel and the ‘Problem’ of 

Arid Spaces.” 72 

25 Spencer R. Weart, “Rise of Interdisciplinary Research on Climate.,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of 

the United States of America 110 (2013): 3657–64. 

26 A recent example: UN Security Council, “UN Security Council 8435th Meeting (PM) SC/13637,” December 20, 2018. 

27 See for example Alexander de Waal, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (London: James 

Currey, 1997), Rolando V Garcia, in Nature Pleads Not Guilty: The 1972 Case History. 1st ed. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 

1981, Glantz, Michael H., ed. The Politics of Natural Disaster: The Case of the Sahel Drought. Praeger Special Studies in 

International Economics and Development. New York: Praeger, 1976. 

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Drought in Africa Symposium 

 When the unfolding crisis in the Sahel hit the anglophone newspaper headlines in early 

1973, it caught the attention of academics at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies 

(SOAS). At the time of the symposium in 1973 colonial-era beliefs and methodologies, 

including environmental determinism and inherent prejudice against the inhabitants of the 

areas studied, coexisted in tension with newer ideas.28 Organised at only seven weeks’ notice, 

the Drought in Africa symposium of the 19th-20th of July 1973 brought together over 100 

academics from a wide range of disciplines to discuss the crisis, stretching from physical 

science to law to anthropology to linguistics.29 The conference led to the publication and 

circulation of a summary report before the end of 1973. This initial report was then followed 

in 1977 by an expansion of the original, Drought in Africa 2.30 The symposium was convened 

by academics R. J. Harrison Church, a geographer from the London School of Economics, and 

a young David Dalby, a linguist, from SOAS. Both the resulting 1973 report and the original 

conference papers demonstrate the competing disciplinary explanations and proposed 

resolutions to the crisis.  

On display at the symposium were a series of narratives that strongly reflect the colonial 

perception of the Sahel, with colonialist environmental imaginaries in evidence alongside 

competing counter narratives. In the earlier work of convenor Harrison Church, he outlined a 

policy vision for West Africa that strongly resonates with these colonialist narratives. His 1963 

work Environment and Policies in West Africa aligned significantly with the paper he 

submitted to the Drought in Africa symposium.31 While Harrison Church did not appear to 

have supported a climatic attribution thesis, he was aligned with those who viewed the Sahelian 

environment as fundamentally degraded and insufficient. There were three key themes to 

Harrison Church’s earlier work that are relevant to understanding the perspectives presented at 

the 1973 symposium. Firstly a belief in environmental determinism, as seen in Harrison 

Church’s 1963 assertion that “in all tropical lands, nature is more compelling and man usually 

less efficient in dealing with his environment than in temperate lands” implying that the 

environment in which people live determines their character, in this case their productivity.32 

Secondly, there are several mentions of “population pressure” as a cause of diminishing soil 

quality among other environmental issues, demonstrating the neo-Malthusian attribution of 

crisis and conflict to expanding populations.33  Finally, in his 1963 work Harrison Church 

discussed the impact of colonial policies on agriculture in the region, particularly plantation 

ownership by non-Africans in French colonial regions, which was minimised in the Drought 

 

28 See page 19 of the Dalby and Harrison Church, Drought in Africa conference report - “It was suggested by one speaker 

that social anthropologists’ data on African societies should be treated with caution, since their discipline has a strong 

methodological bias towards finding self-contained systems, defining anything which does not fit as ‘intrusive’ 

29 Dalby and Harrison Church, Drought in Africa. 

30 David Dalby, R. J. Harrison Church, and Fatima Bezzaz, eds., Drought in Africa 2 =: Sécheresse En Afrique, Rev. and 

expanded ed, African Environment : Special Report 6 (London: International African Institute in association with the 

Environment Training Programme, 1977). 

31 R. J. Harrison Church, Environment and Policies in West Africa, 1st ed. (Princeton, N.J: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 

1963), chap. 4. 

32 Ibid, 101. 

33 Ibid, 102 

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in Africa report.34 However, he also asserted that “West African countries often fared better 

because of colonial connections” in comparison to other African countries.35  

At the symposium, debates about environmental determinism, neo-Malthusianism, and 

the impact of colonialism led to significant conflict. Attendee John Connell stated in the 

geography journal Area that reports from organisations responding to the crisis led to “latent 

political differences becoming manifest and some discussion of neo-colonialism, dependence 

and over-dependence” during the symposium.36 It seems that at the centre of these debates was 

discussion on what level of intervention should have been provided to address the famine and 

to what extent factors such as climatic change, population increases, and degradation of the 

environment, including desertification, were responsible for the famine. For example, in co-

organiser Harrison Church’s paper he claimed that in the Sahel “ordinary subsistence will 

always be extremely hazardous” and thus he said the question must be asked whether “people 

should live in such areas with such terrible and inevitable risks?”37 And yet he was also critical 

of “fatalistic” reports that the Sahara is advancing, and blamed man and livestock for the 

desertification of the region, which he believed could be undone should these pressures be 

relieved.38 Harrison Church thus holds two seemingly contradictory beliefs: that the Sahel itself 

is inherently dangerous, and also that the people who live there are responsible for the 

environmental degradation he perceives to be threatening the environment. Both of these 

beliefs, however, exhorted western intervention and minimised Sahelian agency. 

In direct contrast, Jeremy Swift, a development economist, emphasised the diversity of 

both the Sahel and its people, differentiating between different zones and the individual groups 

who live there. He discussed in detail numerous traditional responses to periods of drought and 

argued that the impact of colonialism had restrained the full range of options available to 

Sahelian people in response to challenges from the environment.39 He also directly contradicted 

the assertions made by some of the climatologists present, discussing at length the variability 

of the climate in the region and directly stated “there are not enough [weather] stations to 

document the yearly variations from place to place”.40 Here we can see some of the methods 

of development studies and postcolonial critique beginning to impact perceptions of the region 

and its people, foreshadowing much of the later work that sought to establish complex 

causality, and indigenous resilience in response to the famine.41 While at the symposium itself 

a wide variety of views were expressed, the report of the symposium prioritised those arguing 

for a more interventionist response to the crisis, including some calls for the evacuation of the 

 

34 Ibid, 104. 

35 Ibid, 111. 

36 John Connell, “Drought in Africa,” Area 5, no. 4 (1973): 270–71. 

37 Dalby and Harrison Church, Drought in Africa, 62. 

38 Ibid, 63. 

39 Ibid, 76-77. This argument was expanded and strengthened Rolando V Garcia, in Nature Pleads Not Guilty: The 1972 

Case History. 1st ed. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981. 

40 Dalby and Harrison Church, Drought in Africa, 71. 

41 By limiting the specificity of regional experiences of the famine, the potential for a specificity of causal factors was also 

reduced, prioritising those explanations which were deemed to have the potential for universality - population growth, 

climate, and environmental degradation. In devaluing indigenous expertise more complex and politicised explanations of the 

famine were decentred. Very few papers sought to investigate local people’s perceptions and responses to drought, and those 

that did generally used only the medium of literary analysis rather than direct dialogue: H T Norris, “Sahel Nomads’ 

Attitudes to Drought (I),” July 1973, SOAS. Centre of African Studies. Conference Files. Box 2 SOAS/CAS/1/5, SOAS 

Library Special Collections.  

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Sahelian region as exemplified by B. W. Hodder of SOAS’s Department of Geography.42 This 

reinforced the narrative that the people of the Sahel required ‘saving’ from the famine, and that 

Western intervention of some kind was the only way to achieve this. This argument strongly 

echoes the justifications for intervention seen in the colonial era discussions of the Sahel. What 

was missing, however, was acknowledgement of the colonial and postcolonial Western 

interventions that played a role in creating the Sahel famine, such as the promotion of cash 

crops that were vulnerable to fluctuations in international markets that hallmarked the 1970s.43 

These interventionist arguments, partially relied on a pessimistic climatic prognosis for the 

region - intervention clearly would not be necessary if the drought was a temporary aberration 

and the environment shortly to be replenished by the return of rains. At the conference, this 

pessimistic prognosis was most strongly promoted by Hubert Lamb. Although at the 

symposium itself, the significance of the prognosis was questioned and its effect was lessened, 

the discursive environment of the early 1970s meant that subsequently, more significance was 

attached to the prognosis accentuating its impact. 

The Construction of a Climate Prognosis 

Hubert Lamb served a 36-year long career in the UK Meteorological Office, until he 

left in 1971 due to methodological differences with the mainstream UK meteorological 

establishment. Lamb’s ways of knowing no longer fit with his institution. He held a prevailing 

belief that examining the historic climatological record was essential for understanding future 

climatic developments. In contrast, the Met Office was increasingly moving towards 

computational modelling for researching the climate.44 Throughout the 1960s, Lamb had spent 

considerable effort reconstructing past climate records, using diverse sources like monastic 

chronicles, ship’s logs, and seasonal accounts from English vineyards. Both in 1967 and 1972, 

Lamb tentatively indicated that he could detect patterns in the data, claiming to see repeating 

oscillations in temperature and other variables at intervals of just under 200-years, with peaks 

in the mid-1300s, and early 1500s, 1700s, and 1900s (Fig. 2).45 In 1972, Lamb founded the 

University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit but struggled to gain funding, as seen in a 

begging letter in the journal Nature in early 1974 and the unsuccessful lobbying of the UK 

government for funds.46 

 

42 Dalby and Harrison Church, Drought in Africa, 21. 

43 Michael F. Lofchie, “Political and Economic Origins of African Hunger,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 13, no. 

4 (1975): 551–67; FAO, “TSFA 1971,” 109. 

44 Janet Martin‐Nielsen, “Ways of Knowing Climate: Hubert H. Lamb and Climate Research in the UK,” WIREs Climate 

Change 6, no. 5 (2015): 465–77. 

45 H. H. Lamb, “Britain’s Changing Climate,” The Geographical Journal 133, no. 4 (1967): 457; H. H. Lamb, Climate: 

Present, Past and Future (London: Methuen, 1972), 236. 

46 Allan Piper, “Lamb’s Unit to the Slaughter?,” Nature 248, no. 5448 (April 1, 1974): 466–67; Climatic Research Unit, vol. 

868, HC Deb (Hansard, 1974). 

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Fig. 2.  Graphs of reconstructed historical temperature in the UK repeatedly used by Lamb to 

tentatively indicate 200-year cycles. (a) shows yearly averages, (b) summer averages, and (c) 

winter averages.47 

 

Lamb’s paper on atmospheric pressure variation was given high priority in the symposium 

report, being the first paper reproduced, and its significance was reinforced by a supplementary 

note from one of Lamb’s colleagues at the Climatic Research Unit emphasising the global 

implications of climatic change. This was despite the fact the paper was barely more than one 

page long and contained no formal references. Lamb ascribed the drought to belts of higher 

 

47 Lamb, “Britain’s Changing Climate,” 457; Lamb, Climate, 236. 

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pressure near the polar regions displacing climatic zones closer to the equator, and tentatively 

linked the Sahel disaster with the 200-year climatic cycle that he had detected in his UK data: 

From this analysis it appears that the phenomenon which is giving rise to the droughts 

has already a long history, of over 20 years of continuous development, and that it is 

not likely to disappear in the near future as part of any cyclic phenomenon. The well 

known cycles of 2 years, 5.5 years, 9.5 years, 11 years and 20-22 years duration 

evidently have nothing to do with it. There are no other such prominent cycles in 

meteorological phenomena shorter than 80-90 years, and the association of this 

phenomenon with changes in the frequencies of different wind directions over the 

British Isles (where we have a long history of the winds) suggests that it is more likely 

associated with a 200-year process.48  

Whether it was his intention or not, the final sentence of Lamb’s paper would come to be 

interpreted as a climate prediction. Lamb’s perceived pattern to the climatic data was reinforced 

by the work of Derek Winstanley, who reported from eight weather stations on the northern 

fringe of the monsoon area, including six in the Sahel. However, this narrative did not resonate 

well with the other meteorologists in the room, such as those associated with the Met Office, 

who claimed that Lamb was oversimplifying a highly complex and heterogeneous atmospheric 

system.49 The idea of a 200-year cycle was also complicated by the papers of D. J. Schove, 

who emphasised 30-year oscillations in climate, and A. T. Grove, who outlined a prior drought 

that had culminated in 1913 (Fig. 1).50 Indeed, it seems that at the symposium itself these 

disagreements blunted the power of Lamb’s hypothesis, with one observer saying “the 

symposium was left to consider the idea that meteorologists could not yet predict long-term 

changes.”51 This was in contrast to the published report, where the “Climate and Water 

Resources” panel chairman’s summary gave space and prominence to Lamb’s ideas.52 Clearly, 

Dalby and Harrison Church saw the prognosis as a significant takeaway of the conference. 

Lamb’s thesis had an immediate impact amongst organisations responding to the 

famine. The Voluntary Committee on Overseas Aid and Development was an umbrella 

organisation that connected the Ministry of Overseas Development with NGOs in the UK. In 

a copy of the symposium report held in the Voluntary Committee’s library, the 200-years figure 

was underlined when it was first mentioned in the chairman’s summary. An organisational 

document created to summarise the symposium also gave rhetorical emphasis to the 200-year 

figure (see appendix). It is clear that any NGO employee consulting the report in the Voluntary 

Committee's library would have been presented with the opinion that the disaster was part of a 

long-term climatic change, and that the Voluntary Committee believed that the 200-year figure 

was worth emphasising. In addition, we see Lamb’s one-page paper cited at meetings 

 

48 Dalby and Harrison Church, Drought in Africa, 27–28. 

49 Dalby and Harrison Church, Drought in Africa, 14. 

50 Ibid, 29-30, 33-45. 

51 Connell, “Drought in Africa.” 

52 Dalby and Harrison Church, Drought in Africa, 13–14. 

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orchestrated by the Rockefeller foundation53 regarding the crisis,54 as well as by social 

scientists trying to criticise and complicate the climatic attribution thesis for the famine.55 

Lamb’s paper, one page and devoid of references, had a larger impact than its format would 

suggest, with its influence resulting mainly from resonant discourses that Lamb had (most 

likely inadvertently) tapped into. 

At the symposium meeting, as previously mentioned, Lamb’s prognosis found support 

in the form of independent scholar Derek Winstanley who had completed his DPhil in 

climatology four years before. Papers were distributed one week before the meeting, and 

Winstanley’s symposium paper at the time of submission did not include any explicit mention 

of the 200-year figure.56 However, the day before the conference began a version of 

Winstanley’s symposium paper was received by the journal Nature and was published in 

September, now including the 200-year figure prominently.57 According to Winstanley, the 

climate paper was fast tracked by Nature staff writer John Gribbin, who later released his own 

series of popular books on climate catastrophe.58 In the article, Winstanley intervened in the 

debates discussed at the symposium about the habitability of the Sahel, explicitly saying 

“massive international aid could be injected into Sahel states but this would destroy the 

nomadic way of life […] the natural solution would be for nomads to shift southwards with the 

rains but this would raise serious political problems”.59 Winstanley here made an implied 

prognosis about future rainfall in the region based on historical data. By engaging in policy 

debates, he made a deterministic, pessimistic, and neo-Malthusian analysis of the capacity of 

the Sahel to support its population. Here the societal implications of the 200-year hypothesis 

were made explicit by a climatologist, implications that the wider media would then pick up 

on. 

Winstanley’s Nature paper was widely reported upon in the popular press. Gribbin 

himself referenced the article extensively in a wide-ranging piece for New Scientist that 

examined the effects of planetary tides on solar output as a possible driving force behind the 

climatic changes.60 The popular environmentalist journal The Ecologist emphasised 

Winstanley’s pessimistic political interventions regarding the prospects for the Sahel (Fig. 3): 

“At the recent symposium on drought in Africa [...], Dr. D. Winstanley pointed out that the 

desert climate will probably continue to shift southwards for a century or more—a devastating 

conclusion.” The editor also drew parallels between Winstanley’s ideas and viewpoints being 

 

53 The family-run Rockefeller Foundation, along with other organisations such as the Ford Foundation, have been 

instrumental in pushing major development policies in the twentieth century such as the Green Revolution and Population 

Control programmes, often as a proxy for the US government, in order to reinforce ‘world order’ based on globalised 

markets and the free-flow of capital. The Rockefeller Foundation had been engaged in the Sahelian region since at least 

independence and had a clear interest in the Sahel crisis, shown in several meetings it helped organise regarding the famine, 

often in conjunction with US government agencies, see: National Academy of Sciences, “International Development 

Strategies for the Sahel: Conference Held at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center, Italy  October 1974,” May 1975; 

Rockefeller Foundation, “The President’s Review and Annual Report” (Rockefeller Foundation, 1974); Rockefeller 

Foundation, “Annual Report” (Rockefeller Foundation, 1960). 

54 National Academy of Sciences, “International Development Strategies for the Sahel.” 

55 Jeremy Swift, “Sahelian Pastoralists: Underdevelopment, Desertification, and Famine,” Annual Review of Anthropology 6, 

no. 1 (1977): 457–78. 

56 Winstanley, “Drought in Sahel Zones: Severity, Causes and Prospects.” 

57 Derek Winstanley, “Rainfall Patterns and General Atmospheric Circulation,” Nature 245, no. 5422 (September 1973): 

190–94. 

58 Derek Winstanley, Interview with Derek Winstanley, interview by Robert L Naylor, Zoom, April 28, 2021. 

59 Winstanley, “Rainfall Patterns and General Atmospheric Circulation,” 194. 

60 John Gribbin, “Our Weather: A Link with the Planets?,” New Scientist, December 27, 1973. 

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put forth by other climatological doomsayers such as Reid Bryson in the US.61 The language 

was highly pessimistic, even apocalyptic. In the general newspapers, an editorial in The Times 

described Winstanley’s paper as “disturbing”:   

A scientific theory must be tested before it can form the basis of political action. But in 

this case the theory has direct relevance to the lives and deaths of millions of human 

beings, and every effort must be made to speed up the process of scientific enquiry so 

that governments and relief organisations can decide what form of action is most 

appropriate. More effort ought to be devoted to climate research both in Britain and 

elsewhere.62 

The editorial in The Times exhorted the scientific community to “speed up” its procedures due 

to the magnitude of the crisis and the need for intervention, demonstrating the conceptual space 

into which crisis disciplines were able to expand. This Times editorial elicited responses from 

readers, some of whom had direct experience of the crisis. Teresa Scott, who had recently 

returned from Mali, saw the 200-year figure as significant: “[i]f these droughts are not 

occasional, but the result of a cyclic variation of climate extending over a period of 200 years, 

then the situation is indeed serious”.63 As we can see, the 200-year figure found resonance 

amongst a wide range of audiences, tapping in as it did to concerns and ideas already circulating 

in this era.  

Fig. 3.  Front cover of The Ecologist from October 1973.64 

 

61 Reid A. Bryson, “Drought in Sahelia: Who or What Is to Blame,” Ecologist, October 1973. 

62 “Nomads With Nowhere To Go?,” The Times, September 28, 1973, The Times Digital Archive. 

63 Teresa Scott, “Drought in Africa,” The Times, October 8, 1973, The Times Digital Archive. 

64 Resurgence & Ecologist, “Ecologist Magazine Archive 1970-1979,” 2021,  

https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/ecologist/issues1970-1979.html. 

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Crisis disciplines in the 1970s produced a wide range of “missions” in response to the 

concerns of the period about environmental degradation, increasing population, and inadequate 

food supply. The response to the Sahel famine, with its emphasis on Western intervention to 

save the Sahelian people, was one such mission.  The 200-year figure was utilised to justify 

and support this endeavour, irrespective of the intentions of Winstanley and Lamb. We can see 

how publications extracted the 200-year figure as the essence of Winstanley’s article - a 

numerical estimate that was simple to understand for non-specialists and carried significant 

implications. The Times, The Ecologist and the 1977 Drought in Africa 2 report demonstrate 

the appeal of this easily-grasped narrative, with the latter claiming that “[t]here are few today 

who would deny that behind the apparently random course of events can be perceived the 

thread of an underlying logic”.65 Of the candidates, climatic change, along with population 

explosions and environmental degradation by locals, represented the simplest and most 

attractive underlying logics for a complex crisis. 

In spite of its appeal in popular narratives, the 200-year figure, which was now 

associated with Winstanley, apparently did not resonate as effectively within more 

conservative mainstream meteorological circles. This can be seen from a citation within a paper 

presented to the Rockefeller Foundation in October 1974, which consisted of a personal 

communication where Winstanley felt he had to make clear that he had been “quoted out of 

context” by the press.66 Indeed, there were multiple levels of confusion, with some observers 

inferring that the drought would last for a century or more, which was not the same as a 200-

year climate cycle that would include both the good times and the bad. Winstanley, who was 

in his 20s, struggled to cope with the sudden attention and the associated requests to be 

interviewed for TV.67 However, he would later go on to have a successful career in science 

administration in the US, co-authoring a paper in the 80s that would somewhat reverse his 

position on climatic causation of worldwide societal events.68 

Beyond the 200-year cycle  

Fascinating though the story of this 200-year figure is, it was not in itself decisive. 

Rather, it formed part of a larger movement in the 1970s towards what Naylor has referred to 

as “crisis climatology”, one of Egan and Soulé’s crisis disciplines.69 Crisis climatology was 

wide-ranging in its theories and methodologies, and was plastic in response to various 

interlinked crises of the 1970s and the resultant injections of funds. The World Food Crisis, 

where global food prices (and the prices of several other commodities) skyrocketed in 1973 

due to shifts in the worldwide economic system, represents one such an event.70 This process 

can be seen most strikingly in a testimony given by Reid Bryson to a US Senate committee in 

October 1973, where Bryson was able to gain the confidence of former US vice president 

Hubert Humphrey, synthesising politically salient events such as Sahelian famine into his 

 

65 Dalby, Church, and Bezzaz, Drought in Africa 2, 17. 

66 National Academy of Sciences, “International Development Strategies for the Sahel,” 35. 

67 Most likely for: “The Weather Machine,” The Radio Times, November 14, 1974. 

68 Donald M. Borock and Derek Winstanley, “Environmental Variables in US Foreign Policy Making: The World Food 

Conference as a Policy Opportunity” (Meeting of the Western Political Science Association and the International Studies 

Association, Denver, Colorado, 1981); Winstanley, Interview with Derek Winstanley. 

69 Naylor, “Reid Bryson: The Crisis Climatologist,”.   

70 Christian Gerlach, “Famine Responses in the World Food Crisis 1972–5 and the World Food Conference of 1974.” 

European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’histoire 22, no. 6 (November 2, 2015): 929–39; Garcia, Nature Pleads 

Not Guilty: The 1972 Case History. 1981. 

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narrative in the process.71 Bryson was not the only 1970s climatologist to enter the public-

political sphere, with Walter Orr Roberts, Stephen Schneider, Herman Flohn, Hubert Lamb, 

and many others contributing to crisis climatology discourse, along with a host of journalists.72 

Lamb and Bryson collaborated on producing work that gave climate-based explanations for 

world events, such as the fall of the Bronze Age Mycenae civilisation, and Lamb contributed 

to meetings that released highly inflammatory, even apocalyptic, statements about the impact 

of climate on the world food situation.73 In addition, Lamb highlighted the magnitude of the 

Sahel famine in Climatic Research Unit reports, and undertook a highly interdisciplinary mode 

of research that hallmarked crisis disciplines.74 Crisis climatology’s bold, untested ideas were 

highly controversial within mainstream meteorology, and the National Center for Atmospheric 

Research entered the media sphere to dispute statements made by crisis climatologists.75 

However, some of the practitioners, through their audacious claims, were able to attract 

attention and funding to their institutions. Bryson himself was richly rewarded by his newfound 

influence, with the research budget of his institute rising to $3m in 1974.76  

In 1974, Lamb’s struggle to find funding for his new institution would bear fruit in the 

form of a $120,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, equivalent to around three quarters 

of a million in 2021.77 According to his autobiography, this had directly resulted from the 

begging letter placed in the journal Nature in 1974. This may well have been Lamb’s view, as 

his autobiography outlines a meeting with Rockefeller representatives that could only be 

described as convivial.78 It is notable, however, that, according to their annual report, the  

Rockefeller Foundation only substantially funded climatologists in 1974 who had made bold 

prognoses regarding Sahelian famine such as Lamb and Bryson. Soon after receiving this 

funding, Lamb largely abandoned the 200-year figure. This can most clearly be seen by the 

revised version of his symposium paper in the second 1977 report, which in contrast to his 

1973 paper, ends on a cautious note: “...the records used were not long enough to substantiate 

this cycle with confidence.”79 

The emergence of the crisis climatology movement saw several international figures 

put forward much more decisive prognoses regarding climate and its impacts, including with 

regards to the Sahel famine. Practitioners, including Lamb and Bryson, were able to utilise the 

 

71 Robert L Naylor, “The Bryson Synthesis: The Forging of Climatic Change as a Political Tool during the World Food 

Crisis (IN PRINT),” Science in Context, 2021. 

72 Walter Orr Roberts and Henry Lansford, The Climate Mandate, 1st ed. (San Franciso, Cal: W. H. Freeman, 1979; Walter 

Orr Roberts, “Climate Change and Its Effect on World Food,” Science and Public Policy 2, no. 6 (June 1975): 264–66; 

Stephen Schneider and Lynne E. Mesirow, The Genesis Strategy: Climate and Global Survival (Springer US, 1976): 106-

107; H. H. Lamb, “Is the Earth’s Climate Changing,” Ecologist 4, no. 1 (1974): 10–15.  

73 R. A. Bryson, H. H. Lamb, and David L. Donley, “Drought and the Decline of Mycenae,” Antiquity 48, no. 189 (March 

1974): 46–50; Roberts, “Climate Change and Its Effect on World Food.” 

74 H. H. Lamb, “The Current Trend of World Climate: A Report on the Early 1970’s and a Perspective,” CRU RP (Norwich: 

Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, 1974). 

75 Henry Lansford, “International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study,” Press Invitation, September 30, 1974, 

NCAR Archives; Roberts and Lansford, Climate Mandate,106–7; Alan Anderson, “Forecast for Forecasting: Cloudy,” New 

York Times, December 29, 1974, sec. SM. 

76 Reid A. Bryson, “Seven Years in Retrospect: The Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison,” 

in Environmental Education in Action II: Case Studies of Environmental Studies Programs in Colleges and Universities 

Today (Ohio: Educational Resources Information Center, 1978), 90. 

77 Rockefeller Foundation, “The President’s Review and Annual Report,” 64. 

78 H. H. Lamb, Through All the Changing Scenes of Life: A Meteorologist’s Tale (Norfolk: Taverner Publications, 1997), 

203–4. 

79 Dalby, Church, and Bezzaz, Drought in Africa 2, 36. 

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prominence of the Sahel disaster in order to promote their ideas and gain institutional 

recognition and funding. It is also clear that climate prognoses in and of themselves were 

powerful narratives that resonated with wider society in the period. Another example of the 

power of these climate narratives, can be seen in the establishment of an Environmental Review 

Unit at SOAS as a direct result of the symposium. Headed by co-organiser David Dalby, the 

unit aimed to incorporate a physical sciences perspective into the school’s repertoire for the 

first time.80 The Environment Review Unit was mission oriented and intended to encourage 

interdisciplinary cooperation to address crises such as the Sahel famine. While the Drought in 

Africa 2 1977 expanded report does include social science papers, the introduction refers 

heavily to “empirical” analysis and data, and “scientific” methods as the necessary tools of 

scholars of the crisis.81 By 1975 social scientists were publicly complaining that their subject 

had been relegated to exploring the impact of the crisis, not the causes.82  

NGOs in the region, such as Rockefeller and those under the Voluntary Committee on 

Overseas Aid & Development umbrella, seem to have resonated with explanations like 

population explosion, environmental degradation by locals, and lack of rainfall as the primary 

causes of the crisis. As outlined earlier, the 1970s was a time where the perception of 

widespread crisis meant that versatile sets of ideas such as Lamb’s, while not accepted in his 

home discipline of meteorology, were taken on in different arenas, such as aid and 

development. Here the politically engaged discipline of crisis climatology contributed to the 

depoliticization of events such as the Sahel famine. This depoliticization of the causes of 

humanitarian crises came under significant criticism in the years following the famine. The 

Humanitarianism Unbound paper by African Rights, released in 1994, is a now well-known 

critique of the expansion of humanitarian action after the Cold War, stating “relief aid delivered 

by international agencies has become integrated into processes of violence and oppression”.83 

David Keen’s 1994 work on famine in Sudan in 1983-89 made a more specific and detailed 

case that aid agencies’ failure to engage with the political dimension of famine resulted in 

donors actively allowing the government’s intentional promotion of famine to continue 

unabated.84 In the Sahel, and Africa as a whole, climatic change remains a tool of 

depoliticization by international agencies, demonstrated by the controversial attribution of the 

Darfur conflict to climatic change by the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in 2007.85 While 

a static climate was viewed as an environmentally determinant indicator of degradation and 

insufficiency to justify intervention and control during colonial periods, now climatic change 

is used for the same purpose to justify the establishment and consolidation of aid and 

development in the region. As ‘static’ climatic determinism exemplified by Harrison Church 

in 1963 transitioned into the ‘dynamic’ climatic determinism promoted by the likes of 

 

80 David Dalby, “The Future Role of the International African Institute,” Africa: Journal of the International African 

Institute 44, no. 4 (1974): 325–26. This unit appears to have faced significant challenges in crossing disciplinary boundaries: 

Paul Richards, “What Environmental Crisis Means in Africa,” Nature 259, no. 5541 (January 1, 1976): 258–59. 

81 Dalby, Church, and Bezzaz, Drought in Africa 2, 17. 

82 Lofchie, “African Hunger”; Swift, “Sahelian Pastoralists.” 

83 African Rights (Organization), Humanitarianism Unbound?: Current Dilemmas Facing Multi-Mandate Relief Operations 

in Political Emergencies (African Rights, 1994), 3. 

84 David Keen. The Benefits of Famine: A Political Economy of Famine and Relief in Southwestern Sudan, 1983-1989. 

James Currey Publishers, 2008. 

85 Mark Maslin, “Climate Change Is Not a Key Cause of Conflict, Finds New Study,” The Conversation, April 24, 2018. 

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Winstanley in 1973, the future of the Sahel as a habitable, productive region was kept out of 

the hands of Sahelians and handed to technocratic elites.86 

Conclusion 

The 200-year figure represents an intersection of diverse resonances and interests, 

allowing it to propagate irrespective of its causal mechanisms, scientific veracity, or acceptance 

by the meteorological community. The Sahel crisis was a complex and contested event about 

which there was insufficient data to evidence any kind of consensus view either within 

academic or public circles. In this situation of little concrete information, a numerical estimate 

for how long the drought may last, no matter how tentatively stated, propagated in the 

discursive landscape of the time. For Lamb, whether he was conscious of it or not, the tentative 

climate prognosis represented a tightrope walk towards greater financial security. It was 

provocative enough to gain attention from important funders, but was also expressed with 

plausible deniability, allowing him to step away from the prognosis if needed, as indeed he 

later did. For Winstanley, the 200-year figure was a hotshot ticket to the moon and back. It 

gave him exposure in the national media, but this was somewhat of a poisoned chalice, with 

Winstanley feeling that his work had been quoted out of context and was to an extent out of 

his control. Partly as a result of early climatic prognoses such as these and partly due to the 

resonant discourse and interests of the period, the Sahel crisis of the early 1970s became 

associated with physical causes and wider climatic change, limiting discussions of the socio-

political causes of the famine right up to the present day.  

 

 

 

Acknowledgements 

The authors would like to thank Derek Winstanley, Mickey Glantz, Vanessa Bell, Simone 

Schleper and Jemma Houghton for their help in preparing this manuscript. The interpretation, 

as well as any errors, remain the authors’. Robert’s PhD is funded by an Economic and Social 

Research Council CASE fellowship partnered with the Royal Meteorological Society. 

NWSSDTP Grant Number ES/P000665/1. Eleanor’s PhD is funded by the National Institute 

for Academic Anaesthesia. 

 

Appendix: In a Nutshell - The Problems of Drought in the Sahel 

This two-page summary document was found within the pages of a copy of the 

‘Drought in Africa’ symposium report that was formerly owned by the Voluntary Committee 

on Overseas Aid & Development, an umbrella organisation which connected the Ministry of 

Overseas Development in the UK with NGOs, including Oxfam, Christian Aid, and the 

Overseas Development Institute. Written in early 1974, it was most likely intended to assist 

committee members as they consulted the report in the committee’s library at Parnell House. 

The charities that were instrumental in organising aid for the Sahel were members of this 

voluntary committee, and all attended this symposium, so this document demonstrates a 

 

86 This trend of prioritising external knowledge of the Sahel reflects that of the wider trend towards the creation of the 

‘development expert’ in aid and development circles, which Uma Kothari argues supported the introduction of a neo-liberal 

development agenda, see Uma Kothari “Authority and Expertise: The Professionalisation of International Development and 

the Ordering of Dissent.” Antipode 37, no. 3 (2005): 425–46. 



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collective awareness of the 200-year figure, as well as an acknowledgement of its perceived 

importance. As this document is not publicly available, we have decided to reproduce the text 

here: 

IN A NUTSHELL - THE PROBLEMS OF DROUGHT IN THE SAHEL 

The Situation. There is a catastrophic drought in Africa, south of the Sahara. Some hundreds 

of thousands of cattle and tens of thousands of people have died - no one knows how many, 

because no one has ever counted either the human or the animal population in this very remote 

and inhospitable part of the world. The remaining people and their livestock have been moving 

southwards, seeking pastures and new farmlands, pressing on a hostile rural population and 

surrounding towns with the low tented encampments of the destitute - which sometimes contain 

as many as ten thousand refugees. People in these camps have lost everything they possess. 

They have left their cattle and sometimes even their babies. 

This situation is six or seven years old now, but Drought is a slowly accumulating condition 

and this year, 1974, promises to be still more fearful than former years.  

The reason for all this. The rains in the Sahel (which is that broad strip right across Africa south 

of the Sahara and north of the Savannah belt) have been sparse for the last six years and in 

some places have failed entirely. They have been too little, too early, too erratic. The causes 

for this are not known but it is thought that pressure at the poles is changing and that this is 

‘pushing’ the earth's pressure belts southwards a few degrees, and moving drier conditions 

further southwards towards the West African coast, The chances are that the present dry cycle 

may last for thirty or - some say - two hundred years.  

The rains have failed before many times (there was a severe drought from 1913 - 21 for 

example) but what makes the present drought so calamitous is that Man has greatly aggravated 

the situation. Well-meaning governments and aid bodies have provided wells and health 

measures for humane and livestock, this has produced an ‘animal explosion'. The nomads have 

been able to increase their herds far beyond the capacity of the pasture to support them, and 

the farmers have extended their cultivation too far. This has led to a savage destruction of 

pasture, soil erosion and ‘desertification’ of the land. The water table has been lowered, some 

fear irreparably. 

The pastoral nomads are the people most affected by this and probably the Tuareg most of all. 

It seems likely that this may be the end of the life of almost all of the nomads. They have 

slaughtered or sold their animals and the farmers have eaten their seed corn.  

Aid and possibly long-term strategies. The Sahelian Zone includes six of the poorest countries 

in the world. For years no one seemed to realise how serious the situation was growing. Since 

last year, however, the international bodies have been pouring in vast quantities of aid - most 

of it in the form of emergency feeding and medical supplies: very little of it in the form of 

viable long-term projects. The reason for this is that very little is known about how to 

rehabilitate such vast arid areas - anyway it is astronomically expensive. Certainly no 

government understands the people, particularly the nomads, in these areas. 

The debate on long-term strategies, usually favours settlement or the restoration of pastoral 

nomadism, with the development of local industries and oil where possible. Settlement, of 

course, is a practice that the townsman understands while on the other side the restoration of 

nomadism is naturally criticised because this may merely lead to the building up once more of 

herds that are too large for the pasture. 



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The important Symposium on Drought held last summer at the School of Oriental and African 

Studies held the view that policies for development in the Sahel were doomed to failure unless 

they bore in mind the attitudes and practices of those who live in their area, and their 

relationship to their Sahelian environment.  

"As long as they are thought of as backward peoples to be assimilated as fast as possible to 

models of development currently in vogue elsewhere, then no real progress can be made. Here 

is a large body of peoples with many of the skills and aptitudes needed to exploit huge areas of 

Western Africa, an environment so harsh that it is difficult to imagine anyone else wanting, let 

alone being able to use it. This land is essential to the development of West Africa."  

And yet, in fact, it seems that no administrator has ever consulted the people who live there 

over their own problems in the Drought. 

 

 


