A new study on Monday is the latest to suggest that climate change is already making people’s lives worse, this time for those allergic to pollen. The findings show that the pollen season in North America has become measurably longer and pollen has become more abundant over the past three decades, in part due to a warmer climate.
There are different types of pollen from plants and trees that occur at different times of the year. But usually, the pollen season starts in early spring and continues through summer and early fall. These months have been accompanied by an increase in seasonal allergies, also called hay fever or allergic rhinitis. Patients experience cold symptoms such as a stuffy or runny nose, watery eyes, and itching around their nose and palate.
The researchers looked at data from pollen counting stations in the US and Canada, which spanned between 1990 and 2018. During those years, they found that the pollen season had 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 was everywhere, areas like Texas and the US Midwest saw the greatest increases in total pollen in those years.
Some studies have found evidence in the lab that warmer temperatures should lead to worse pollen seasons. Others have predicted that certain allergy-causing plants such as ragweed will be more widespread in the coming decades. But the new findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is one of the first studies to explicitly link climate change with worse pollen seasons, and suggests that it is making things worse here and now.
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“Our results indicate that man-made climate change has already worsened the North American pollen seasons,” the authors wrote.
Climate change isn’t the only factor that has made pollen season more of a nightmare for people with allergies in recent years, they noted. But according to their model, climate change is likely to be primarily responsible for about half of the extra days observed during this time period, along with 8% of the heavier pollen counts. They also found that climate change has made a greater contribution to the pollen season over the years, which doesn’t bode well for what lies ahead.
“It is likely that in the near future climate change will have an even greater impact on the pollen seasons and respiratory health,” study author William Anderegg, a biologist at the University of Utah, Gizmodo told via email. “We saw in our research that the effects of climate change were more pronounced in the period 2003-2018 compared to the full period 1990-2018. So we highly expect this trend and its health consequences to continue in the next decade or two. “
Of course, much more pollen every year isn’t all that climate change is bringing when it comes to human health. In the US, experts fear that longer and warmer seasons increase the risk of a host of health problems, from tick-borne diseases such as Lyme disease to heart attacks and heat stroke to spread tropical diseases if global warming allows spread poleward.