Toe dr. Starting as an allergist in Atlanta, Stanley Fineman told patients to start taking their medication and prepare for the drip, sneezing attack of the pollen season around St. Louis. Patrick’s Day. That was about 40 years ago. Now he tells them to start around Valentine’s Day.
Across the United States and Canada, pollen season begins 20 days earlier and pollen rates have been 21% higher since 1990, much of which is due to global warming, a new study found in The Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences of Monday. .
While other studies have shown that the North American allergic season is getting longer and worse, it is the most comprehensive data with 60 reporting stations and the first to make the required and detailed calculations that can attribute what happens to human climate change, experts said.
“It’s a crystal clear example that climate change is here and that it’s in every breath we take,” says lead author Bill Anderegg, a biologist and climate scientist at the University of Utah who also has ‘many bad allergies.’
Chris Downs, a 32-year-old mechanical engineer in St. Louis, Missouri Louis, gets all the sinus problems, headaches and the worst of all the itchy red eyes – and his Facebook friends in the area tell him that they feel the same. He said the allergies, which started 22 years ago, usually hit in March, but this year and last year it was already early February, along with flowers from trees and flowers outside.
“As a kid, I never saw anything begin to bloom in February, now I see a handful of years like this,” Downs said.
The warmer the earth, the earlier spring begins for plants and animals, especially those that release pollen. Add to that the fact that trees and plants produce more pollen when they get carbon dioxide, the study said.
“It’s clear that the temperature is getting warmer and that more carbon dioxide is putting more pollen into the air,” Anderegg said. Trees spew the allergy-causing particles earlier than grasses, he said, but scientists do not know why this is the case. Just look at cherry blossoms that opened several days earlier in Japan and Washington, DC., he said.
Texas is the place where some of the biggest changes are taking place, Anderegg said. The southern and southern Middle East get pollen season about 1.3 days earlier each year, while it gets to the West about 1.1 days earlier, he said. The northern Middle East gets an allergy season about 0.65 days earlier a year, and it comes 0.33 days earlier a year in the southeast. In Canada, Alaska and the Northeast, researchers could not see a statistically significant trend.
Anderegg said his team takes into account that parks and plants in cities are getting greener. They performed standard detailed calculations that scientists developed to see if changes in nature could be attributed to the increase in heat catches due to the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. They compare what is happening now with computer simulations of an earth without heating by humans and rising carbon dioxide in the air.
Since 1990, about half of the earlier pollen season can be attributed to climate change – mostly due to warmer temperatures – but also to the plant-fed carbon dioxide, Anderegg said. But since the 2000s, about 65% of the earlier pollen seasons could be blamed for the warming, he said. About 8% of the increased pollen tax could be attributed to climate change, he said.
Dr. Fineman, former president of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology and who was not part of the study, said it makes sense and fits what he sees: “Pollen really follows the temperature. There is no question. ”
While doctors and scientists knew the allergic season was taking place, no one has done formal climate studies so far to understand the reason, said Kristie Ebi, a professor of environmental health at the University of Washington. It could help scientists estimate how many allergies and asthma cases “could be due to climate change,” she said.
It’s not just a matter of sniffing.
“We need to care about the pollen season because pollen is a major risk factor for allergic diseases such as hay fever and asthma exacerbations,” said Amir Sapkota, a professor of environmental health at the University of Maryland who was not part of the study. ‘Asthma costs the US economy an estimated $ 80 billion a year in terms of treatment and loss of productivity. Thus, a longer pollen season poses real threats to individuals suffering from allergies, as well as the US economy. ”
Sapkota recently found a correlation between the onset of early spring and the increased risk of asthma hospitalizations. One study found that students perform worse with tests due to pollen levels, Anderegg said.
Gene Longenecker, a danger geographer who recently returned to Alabama, did not really suffer from pollen allergies when he moved to Atlanta. Then he moved to Colorado: ‘Every summer was just crushing headaches and such big things, and (I) started allergy testing and found out that I am allergic to everything in Colorado – at least trees, grasses and pollen, weeds. ”
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