When Dr. Stanley Fineman started as an allergist in Atlanta, he told patients to start taking their medications and prepare for the dreary, sneezy onslaught of the St. Patrick’s Day pollen season. That was about 40 years ago. Now he says they should start around Valentine’s Day.
In the United States and Canada, the pollen season starts 20 days earlier and pollen counts are up 21% since 1990 and much of that is due to global warming, a new study in Monday’s journal found. Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. .
While other studies have shown that the allergy season in North America is getting worse, these are the most comprehensive data with 60 reporting stations and the first to make the required and detailed calculations that can attribute to what is happening with man-made climate change, experts say.
“This is a crystal clear example that climate change is here and it’s in every breath we take,” said lead author Bill Anderegg, a biologist and climate scientist at the University of Utah who also has “really bad allergies.”
Chris Downs, a 32-year-old mechanical engineer in St. Louis, is already experiencing sinus problems, headaches, and worst itchy red eyes – and his nearby Facebook friends tell him they feel the same way. He said the allergies, which started 22 years ago, usually hit in March, but this year and last year they were already in early February, along with the blossoming of trees and flowers outside.
“As a kid I never saw anything bloom in February, now I see a handful of years like that,” said Downs.
The warmer the earth gets, the sooner spring sets in for plants and animals, especially those that release pollen. Add to this the fact that trees and plants produce more pollen when they get carbon dioxide, the study said.
“These are clearly warming temperatures and more carbon dioxide that is putting more pollen into the air,” Anderegg said. Trees spew out the allergy-causing particles earlier than grasses, he said, but scientists aren’t sure why that is the case. Just look at cherry blossoms that opened a few days earlier in Japan and Washington, DC., he said.
Texas is where some of the biggest changes are happening, Anderegg said. The South and South Midwest get the pollen season about 1.3 days earlier each year, while it comes about 1.1 days earlier in the West, he said. The Northern Midwest gets allergy season about 0.65 days earlier each year, and it occurs 0.33 days earlier each year in the Southeast. In Canada, Alaska and the Northeast, researchers could not see a statistically significant trend.
Anderegg said his team was taking into account that parks and plants in cities were getting greener. They performed standard detailed calculations that scientists have developed to see if changes in nature can be attributed to the increase in heat trapping gases from the combustion of coal, oil and natural gas. They compared what is happening now with computer simulations of an earth without human-caused warming and rising carbon dioxide in the air.
Since 1990, about half of the earlier pollen season can be attributed to climate change – usually from the warmer temperatures – as well as from the plant-feeding carbon dioxide, Anderegg said. But since the 2000s, about 65% of the earlier pollen seasons can be attributed to warming, he said. About 8% of the increased pollen load can be attributed to climate change, he said.
Dr. Fineman, former president of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology and who was not there said that this makes sense and fits with what he sees: “Pollen really follows the temperature. There is no question. “
While doctors and scientists knew allergy season was happening earlier, until now no one had conducted formal climate attribution studies to help understand why, said Kristie Ebi, an environmental health professor at the University of Washington, who was not part of the study. This could help scientists estimate how many allergies and asthma cases “could be the result of climate change,” she said.
This isn’t just a matter of snooping.
“We should be concerned about the pollen season because pollen is a major risk factor for allergic conditions such as hay fever and worsening asthma,” said Amir Sapkota, an environmental health professor 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. A longer pollen season thus poses a real threat to allergy sufferers as well as the US economy. “
Sapkota has recently found an association between an earlier onset of spring and an increased risk of asthma hospital admissions. One study found that students fare worse on tests because of pollen levels, Anderegg said.
Gene Longenecker, a hazard geographer who recently returned to Alabama, didn’t really suffer from pollen allergies until he moved to Atlanta. Then he moved to Colorado: “Every summer it was just crushing headaches and big things like that and (I) started allergy testing and found that, well, I’m allergic to everything in Colorado – trees, grasses and pollen, weeds at the very least. “
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