Climate Central: The conifer forests of the North American west have been under a massive assault over the past decade by bark beetles: one species alone, the mountain pine beetle, has killed more than 70,000 square miles' worth of trees, equivalent to the area of Washington State, and two recent studies have shed some light on how climate change is helping fuel the assault, and what's likely to happen in a world that continues to warm.
The first, published in the journal Ecology, shows how intense drought can...