In the South, the beetles have long been a major forest pest. The beetles tunnel through a tree’s bark and feast on a vital layer of tissue that provides the tree with water and nutrients. As the pine dies, its needles fade from green to yellow to red.

The beetle’s northward spread is a reminder of the seemingly countless ways that climate change can upset the established order of ecosystems.

Matthew P. Ayres, a Dartmouth biologist who researches the beetles but was not involved in the study, said the new analysis could serve as a model for predicting how warmer extremes could alter the ranges of other insects and plants. “It’s reasonable to assume that there are hundreds or thousands of other species that may also be affected,” he said.

The Columbia researchers used climate modeling to predict the beetles’ spread as global warming intensifies. But unlike previous projections, which have tended to assume uniform temperature increases across a region, the researchers focused on temperatures during winter’s coldest nights. Temperatures on those nights must fall to about 8 degrees below zero to kill most beetles, but that is simply not happening across much of the Northeast.

“It’s unique in that it employs our best climate models to project patterns in the coldest night of the winter,” Dr. Ayres said of the study. “In biology, that coldest night is more important than average temperatures.”

The situation in the Northeast resembles an outbreak of mountain pine beetles that has ravaged millions of acres of forest across the Western United States and Canada — a devastation that has also been attributed to climate change.