A wide range of climate change-induced effects have been implicated in the prevalence of infectious diseases. Disentangling causes and consequences, however, remains particularly challenging at historical time scales, for which the quality and quantity of most of the available natural proxy archives and written documentary sources often decline. Here, we reconstruct the spatiotemporal occurrence patterns of human epidemics for large parts of China and most of the last two millennia. Cold and dry climate conditions indirectly increased the prevalence of epidemics through the influences of locusts and famines. Our results further reveal that low-frequency, long-term temperature trends mainly contributed to negative associations with epidemics, while positive associations of epidemics with droughts, floods, locusts, and famines mainly coincided with both higher and lower frequency temperature variations. Nevertheless, unstable relationships between human epidemics and temperature changes were observed on relatively smaller time scales. Our study suggests that an intertwined, direct, and indirect array of biological, ecological, and societal responses to different aspects of past climatic changes strongly depended on the frequency domain and study period chosen.

Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis Department of Biosciences University of Oslo N 0316 Oslo Norway

Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis Department of Biosciences University of Oslo N 0316 Oslo Norway;

CzechGlobe Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences 60300 Brno Czech Republic

Department of Geography Masaryk University 61137 Brno Czech Republic

Department of Geography University of Cambridge CB2 3EN Cambridge United Kingdom

State Key Laboratory of Integrated Management of Pest Insects and Rodents in Agriculture Institute of Zoology Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100101 China

State Key Laboratory of Integrated Management of Pest Insects and Rodents in Agriculture Institute of Zoology Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100101 China;

Swiss Federal Research Institute for Forest Snow and Landscape 8903 Birmensdorf Switzerland

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Dec 5;114(49):12845-12847. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1717723114. PubMed

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