http://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/opinion/allergies-climate-change.html
GUEST ESSAY
It’s Not Your Imagination. Your Allergies Are Getting Worse.
May 13, 2024
Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.
It’s spring, and I love spring more than I love almost anything else about the natural world, but I don’t love the pollen. My eyes itch. My nose is stopped up. First thing in the morning I sneeze. Last thing at night I sneeze. My husband turns away from me to sleep because the pollen grains clinging to my hair make him sneeze, too.
I was never prone to seasonal allergies before I moved to Middle Tennessee, which is not even one of the 10 most challenging places for allergy sufferers in this country. I am now up to three over-the-counter medications a day, and I have developed a tiny dependence on Fisherman’s Friend lozenges, which work a bit like the Vicks VapoRub of my childhood memories. Vicks is still around — the comedian Wanda Sykes has a wonderful bit about it — but Fisherman’s Friend doesn’t announce my presence in advance the way Vicks would.
I also drink gallons of an herbal tea labeled “congestion relief,” though I no longer believe that relief is possible. The hill of spring allergies, which in Middle Tennessee used to be on the downslope by now, has become an all-year mountain, with tree pollen and grass pollen and ragweed pollen rolling together in great clouds from late February right up till Thanksgiving.
But it’s worse in spring. I can stand at my back door and watch a white pine like this one sending out waves of pollen that remind me of the crop-duster scene in “North by Northwest.” In spring, my glasses are coated with pollen outside and in. In spring, my little red Nissan Leaf looks like a little orange Leaf, and the gray boards of our back deck look as though they’ve grown a coating of new moss.
The only relief for any of it is a good soaking rain, but the reprieve of rain is only temporary. Increased rainfall prolongs the blooming season of many trees, grasses and other plants. (Most wildflowers are pollinated by insects and therefore aren’t prime allergy-inducers, but some, like ragweed, are wind-pollinated, which means they literally throw their pollen to the winds — and into human faces.) A prolonged blooming season in turn allows plants to produce more pollen.
A changing climate, a changing world
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Climate change around the world: In “Postcards From a World on Fire,” 193 stories from individual countries show how climate change is reshaping reality everywhere, from dying coral reefs in Fiji to disappearing oases in Morocco and far, far beyond.
The role of our leaders: Writing at the end of 2020, Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, found reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency, a feeling perhaps borne out by the passing of major climate legislation. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been criticisms. For example, Charles Harvey and Kurt House argue that subsidies for climate capture technology will ultimately be a waste.
The worst climate risks, mapped: In this feature, select a country, and we’ll break down the climate hazards it faces. In the case of America, our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths.
What people can do: Justin Gillis and Hal Harvey describe the types of local activism that might be needed, while Saul Griffith points to how Australia shows the way on rooftop solar. Meanwhile, small changes at the office might be one good way to cut significant emissions, writes Carlos Gamarra.
Seasonal allergies are nothing new, but they’ve been worsening as the climate grows warmer. The growing season starts earlier now — in North America an average of 20 days earlier — and lasts longer, too, extending the length of time when plants are pumping pollen into the air. And the resulting misery arises not just because there’s more pollen to breathe in or because it’s around for increasingly longer seasons. At least one study has indicated that the more carbon there is in the air, the more potent the pollen itself is.
Hay fever kicks in when the immune system isn’t able to distinguish between a genuine threat (like a virus) and particles like pollen that are harmless. That’s why adults can develop seasonal allergies when they move to a new region and encounter pollens their immune system doesn’t recognize. Now, thanks to climate change, you don’t even need to move: The warmer climate is shifting growing zones northward, allowing plants to extend their natural range.
In human beings, this all adds up to seasonal allergies that are more widespread and more severe, and it’s only going to get worse: One study predicts a 200 percent increase in pollen production by the end of this century. “In 2018, 7.7 percent of American adults experienced ‘hay fever,’” noted the science journalist Yasmin Tayag in The Atlantic last year. “By 2021, that proportion had risen to about a quarter.” The article is titled “There Is No Stopping the Allergy Apocalypse.”
Weighed against true climate calamities like deadly heat waves and inundated coastal communities, hay fever may seem like little more than an inconvenience. What’s a few weeks — even months — of itchy eyes and runny noses compared with the global population migrations that are coming? But allergies aren’t mere irritants.
Someone who is suffering from seasonal allergies may be less able to exercise, more vulnerable to infection, less productive at work (if not actually absent), more likely to require treatment in an emergency room. Seasonal allergies have been linked to an increase in both the prevalence and severity of asthma, which is particularly worrisome for children.
None of this is surprising to anyone who’s paying attention to the way the changing climate affects everything nowadays. Wherever you live, even if you aren’t evacuating to avoid a hurricane, or keeping a go bag by the door in case of a wildfire, or wondering if it’s time to move to higher ground, climate change is now affecting your daily life. It’s making wine taste different, sleep more fitful, air travel more turbulent. It’s making the very air harder to breathe.
Meanwhile, the planet will continue to warm, and plants will continue to produce more pollen, and in more concentrated doses, for a longer period of time each year. People who suffer from seasonal allergies will feel worse, and people who aren’t currently troubled by allergy symptoms may yet find themselves sneezing and rubbing their eyes. As Ms. Tayag points out in her Atlantic article, “At this point, not much can be done to stop it.”
That’s true, but a lot can be done to keep it from getting incomprehensibly worse. In the doom versus optimism debate about the climate, much of the optimism lies in the way technology, shored up by policy and legislation, is rising to the challenge faster and more effectively than we ever imagined it could. “Stunning, record-breaking gains in wind and solar power around the world,” David Geddes of The Times writes, means that “a full 30 percent of global electricity was generated by renewables last year.” The time we have left to change our climate’s devastating trajectory is dwindling, but we are finally beginning to take the steps necessary to change it.
But we are only beginning, and beginnings can be snuffed out. At his Mar-a-Lago resort last month, Donald Trump told a group of oil executives and lobbyists that they should donate $1 billion to his campaign because he plans to reverse Joe Biden’s clean energy policies, among other environmental protections opposed by Big Oil, if he is returned to the White House.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.”
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