Global Warming Spreading Pests Far and Wide According To Study

An anonymous reader writes "New research has concluded that global warming is helping pests and diseases that attack crops to spread around the world. 'Researchers from the universities of Exeter and Oxford have found crop pests are moving at an average of two miles (3km) a year. The team said they were heading towards the north and south poles, and were establishing in areas that were once too cold for them to live in. The research is published in the journal Nature Climate Change.'"

Comments

Re:Why not, if other things can flourish also?

[MightyMartian]

The problem here is that it seems rather likely that the habitable zones won't grow in size. Rather they will shift in latitude. There will be very real geopolitical ramifications to the North American and Eurasian growth zones jumping northward. Imagine the North American Grain Belt heading a few degrees north. All of a sudden, large areas currently under cultivation in the United States cease to arable, or at least cheaply arable. At the same time, Canada gains large amounts of arable land much farther north. In a few generations, you could see US food security compromised, with large amounts of the grain it needs suddenly in another sovereign country. The US will almost certainly be able to come to some accord with Canada, but other parts of the world may not be so lucky. A brief survey of historic and prehistoric migrations heavily suggests that people don't just sit on their asses and quietly die out when they can no longer get enough food and water.