When Dr. Stanley Fineman began as an allergist in Atlanta, he told patients that they should start taking their medications and prepare for the stern and sneezing attack of the pollen season around the St. Patrick’s Day. It 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% higher since 1990 and a large chunk is due to global warming, a new study found to Monday’s journal The Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.
Although other studies have shown that the North American allergy season is getting longer and worse, these are the most complete data with 60 information stations and the first to make the necessary and detailed calculations that could attribute what is happening to human-caused climate change, experts said.
“This is a clear example that climate change is here and that it breathes in every breath,” 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 in Saint Louis, already has sinus problems, headaches and the worst red eyes itching and his Facebook friends in the area tell him they feel the same way. He said the allergies, which started 22 years ago, used to come in March, but this year and last year they were already in early February, along with tree flowers and flowers outside.
“As a kid I never saw anything start to bloom in February, now I see a handful of years like that,” Downs said.
The more heat the Earth heats up, the sooner spring begins for plants and animals, especially those that release pollen. Added to this is the fact that trees and plants produce more pollen when they get carbon dioxide, according to the study.
“It’s clearly warmer temperatures and more carbon dioxide that put more pollen into the air,” Anderegg said. Trees release allergy-causing particles before herbs, he said, but scientists don’t know why. Just look at the cherries that open a few days earlier in Japan and Washington, DC., He said.
Some of the most important changes are taking place in Texas, Anderegg said. The southwest and southwest southwest have a pollen season about 1.3 days earlier each year, while it will arrive about 1.1 days earlier in the west, he said. The Northwest experiences an allergy season about 0.65 days earlier in the year and approaches 0.33 days earlier each year in the southeast. In Canada, Alaska and northeastern researchers could not see a statistically significant trend.
Anderegg said his team was aware that city parks and plants were becoming more environmentally friendly. 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 with 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, mainly due to warmer temperatures, but also due to plant-fed carbon dioxide, Anderegg said. But since the 2000s, about 65 percent of previous pollen seasons can be blamed for warming, he said. He said about 8% of the increase in pollen load can be attributed to climate change.
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 are no questions. “
Although doctors and scientists knew a previous allergy season was occurring, so far no one had done formal climate attribution studies to help understand why, said the environmental health professor at the University of Washington, Kristie Ebi, who was not part of the study. This can help scientists calculate how many allergies and asthma cases “could be due to climate change,” he said.
This is not just a matter of sniffing.
“We should be concerned about pollen season because pollen is a major risk factor for allergic diseases such as hay fever and exacerbation of asthma,” said Amir Sapkota, professor University of Maryland Environmental Health, which was not part of the study. “Asthma costs the US economy about $ 80 billion a year in terms of treatment and lost productivity. Therefore, a longer pollen season poses real threats to people with allergies. , as well as for the economy of the United States ”.
Sapkota has recently found a correlation between early spring and increased asthma risk hospitalizations. One study found that students do worse on tests due to pollen levels, Anderegg said.
Gene Longenecker, a risk geographer who recently returned to Alabama, did not really suffer from pollen allergies until he moved to Atlanta. He then moved to Colorado: “Every summer I was just crushing headaches and big things like that and I started doing allergy testing and I found out that, well, I’m allergic to everything in Colorado. , at least trees, grasses, and pollens, weeds. “
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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.