Study: Global warming might help insects in war on plants
By Greg Kline
Tuesday March 25, 2008
Darrell Hoemann
University of Illinois professors May Berenbaum and Evan DeLucia have released a new study showing that high carbon dioxide levels, as in climate change and global warming, impair the defenses of plants against insects.
When University of Illinois researchers found that soybean plants heavily exposed to carbon dioxide at an open-air lab here suffered more insect damage – and that the insects damaging them lived longer – they wondered what was behind the effects.
The result: a UI study indicating that higher carbon dioxide levels associated with man-made emissions, generally thought to play into climate change and global warming, appear to make plants, soybeans anyway, more susceptible to some insect damage by impairing their chemical defensive systems.
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