When Dr. Stanley Fineman began being an allergist in Atlanta, he told patients that they should start taking their medications and prepare for the drop and sneeze attack of pollen season around St. Patrick. That was about 40 years ago. Now he tells them to start around Valentine’s Day.
In the United States and Canada, the pollen season begins 20 days earlier, and pollen loads are 21 percent higher since 1990 and much of it is due to global warming, a new study found in Monday’s journal, Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.
While other studies have shown that the allergy season in North America is getting longer and worse, these are the most comprehensive data with 60 reporting stations and the first to make the necessary and detailed calculations that could attribute what is happening to the changes. man-made climate change, experts said.
“This is a clear example that climate change is here and is in every breath we take,” said lead author Bill Anderegg, a biologist and climate scientist at the University of Utah who also has “very bad allergies.”
Chris Downs, a 32-year-old mechanical engineer from St. Louis already has sinus problems, headaches and the worst itchy red eyes – and his Facebook friends in the area tell him they feel the same way. He said allergies, which started 22 years ago, usually hit in March, but this year and last year they were already around in early February, along with tree flowers and flowers outside.
“As a child, I didn’t see anything start to bloom in February, now I see a few years like that,” 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 temperatures are heating up and more carbon dioxide puts more pollen in the air,” Anderegg said. Trees drop allergy-causing particles earlier than grasses, he said, but scientists aren’t sure why. Look at the cherry blossoms that open a few days earlier in Japan and Washington, DC., he said.
Texas is where some of the biggest changes are happening, Anderegg said. The southwest and south Midwest receive pollen season about 1.3 days earlier each year, while it comes about 1.1 days earlier in the west, he said. The Northwest Midwest receives an allergic season about 0.65 days earlier a year and comes 0.33 days earlier a year in the southeast. In Canada, Alaska and researchers in the Northeast could not see a statistically significant trend.
Anderegg said his team has taken into account the fact that parks and plants in cities are turning greener. They made standard detailed calculations that scientists have developed to see if changes in nature can be attributed to the increase in heat-capturing gases from burning coal, oil and natural gas. They compared what is happening now to computer simulations of an Earth without human-caused warming and rising carbon dioxide in the air.
Since 1990, about half of the previous pollen season can be attributed to climate change – mostly from warmer temperatures – but also from plant-fed carbon dioxide, Anderegg said. But since the 2000s, about 65 percent of previous pollen seasons can be blamed for warming, he said. About 8 percent 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 part of the study, 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 there was an allergic season earlier, so far no one had conducted official climate allocation studies to help understand the reasons, said University of Washington environmental health professor Kristie Ebi, who was not part of the study. This can help scientists estimate how many allergies and cases of asthma “could be due to climate change,” she said.
This is not just a matter of sniffles.
“We should care about pollen season, because pollen is a major risk factor for allergic diseases, such as hay fever and exacerbation of asthma,” said University of Maryland environmental health professor Amir Sapkota. was part of the study. “Asthma is costing the US economy about $ 80 billion a year in terms of treatment and lost productivity. So, a longer pollen season poses real threats to both allergy sufferers and the US economy. ”
Sapkota recently found a correlation between early spring onset and increased risk of asthma hospitalizations. One study found that students do worse on tests because of the pollen level, Anderegg said.
Gene Longenecker, a geographer of dangers who recently returned to Alabama, did not really suffer from pollen allergies until he moved to Atlanta. Then he moved to Colorado: “Every summer there was just overwhelming headaches and big things like that and (I) started allergy testing and found out that, well, I’m allergic to everything in Colorado – the little trees, grasses and pollen, weeds. ”
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