Credit: NEWSCOM

J. Geophys. Res. doi:10.1029/2009JD011833 (2009)

Climate change may cause increasingly frequent plagues of crop-destroying locusts (pictured) in China. Ge Yu and her colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing looked at records of locust outbreaks throughout more than 1,000 years and compared them to climate data, using annual records from the past 150 years and decadal information going back a millennium.

In northern China, locust numbers tended to explode in years with warm, wet winters and warm, dry springs and summers. In the south, the insects swarmed in years with warm and wet springs. Because higher temperatures were consistently associated with outbreaks, the authors suggest that a warming China may be one with more locusts.