A new study from Monday is the latest to suggest that climate change is already making people’s lives worse, this time for those who are allergic to pollen. The findings suggest that the pollen season in North America has become measurably longer and that pollen has become abundant over the past three decades, in part due to a warmer climate.
There are different types of pollen from plants and trees that are common at different times of the year. But usually the pollen season starts in early spring and lasts through summer and early fall. These months are associated with an increase in seasonal allergies, also known as hay fever or allergic rhinitis. Sufferers experience cold symptoms such as a stuffy or runny nose, watery eyes, along with itching around their nose and mouth.
The researchers of the study looked at data from pollen counting stations in the US and Canada, which run between 1990 and 2018. During those years, they found that the pollen season changed significantly. Compared to 1990, the average pollen season in an area now starts about 20 days earlier, lasts 10 days longer and pumps out 21% more pollen. While this change has been seen everywhere, areas such as Texas and the Midwestern United States have seen the largest increase in total pollen during those years.
Some studies in the laboratory have found evidence that warmer temperatures should lead to worse pollen times. Others have predict that certain allergy-causing plants such as ragweed will become widespread over the next few decades. But the new findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is among the first research that explicitly links climate change to worse pollen times, and suggests that it exacerbates things here and now.
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“Our results indicate that human-caused climate change has already exacerbated North American pollen season,” the authors wrote.
Climate change is not the only factor that has made the pollen season a nightmare for allergy sufferers over the past few years. But according to their model, it is likely that climate change is primarily responsible for about half of the additional days seen during this time, along with 8% of the heavier pollen counts. They also found that climate change in the pollen season made a greater contribution as the years went by, which does not exactly predict what lies ahead.
“Climate change is likely to have an even greater impact on pollen times and respiratory health in the near future,” studied author William Anderegg, a biologist. at the University of Utah, told Gizmodo by email. ‘We saw in our study that the impact of climate change was more pronounced during the period 2003-2018 compared to the full period 1990-2018. We therefore expect this trend to continue at least for the next decade or two, and the health consequences will continue. ”
Of course, much more pollen each year is not the only thing that climate change threatens to bring about in terms of human health. In the US, experts fear that longer and warmer seasons will increase the risk of many health problems, due to illnesses such as Lyme disease on heart attacks and heat stroke to the spread of tropical diseases, as it allows them through the warming spread poleward.