From “the stupid, it burns” department and Breitbart.
Global warming is fueling the growth of plants, which means that allergy sufferers can expect more pollen, and in turn more sneezing and red, itchy eyes, according to a new report by CBS News.
Warming global temperatures mean “another tough season for allergy sufferers,” CBS warns, as “warm weather is arriving up to 20 days earlier this year in some places.”
In recent years, “climate change” has been blamed for myriad ills, including everything from a slump in coffee production to devastating hurricanes to a drop in the population of Hawaiian monk seals to the decimation of migratory songbirds and even colder winters.
Now, thanks to CBS, we know that peoples’ allergies would not be nearly as bad if fewer people drove SUVs.
“The climate and the weather has an impact on the start, the duration, and the intensity of allergy season,” Dr. Tara Narula told CBS This Morning on Friday. “With global warming, we know last year was one of the hottest on record, as well as increased carbon dioxide emissions. This all fuels the growth of plants, which means more pollen, earlier pollen, and pollen that stays around longer,” she added.
Dr. Tara Narula even went so far as to predict the concentration of pollen grains per cubic meter of air in the year 2040. Her answer? “Around 20,000.”
To combat global warming’s negative effects on allergies, Narula recommends starting anti-allergenic drugs earlier in the season.
“So about two weeks before the season starts you want to start taking either your over-the-counter meds or your prescription meds,” she said. “There are things like allergy shots and now sublingual medicines that you can take, immunotherapy.”
Anthropogenic climate change—the idea that human emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere are significantly driving global temperatures upwards—has become the convenient scapegoat for problems ranging from the mass deaths of reindeer to the creation of “ghost forests” along the U.S. Atlantic seaboard.
“I think ghost forests are the most obvious indicator of climate change anywhere on the Eastern coast of the U.S.,” said Matthew Kirwan, a professor at Virginia Institute of Marine Science who studies ghost forests. “It was dry, usable land 50 years ago; now it’s marshes with dead stumps and dead trees.”
Fortunately, amidst the ecological hysteria generated by global warming alarmists, rational voices can occasionally be heard.
A refreshingly sober essay by John Horgan in Scientific American last month counseled readers to “chill out” over the apocalyptic scenarios drawn up by climate change prophets of doom.
Horgan, the director of the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology, explored two recent reports by “ecomodernists” who reject climate panic and frame the question of climate change and humanity’s ability to cope with it in radically new terms.
The reports urged people to reject climate “fatalism” and to regain some much-needed perspective on climate, both in the context of the overwhelming benefits of industrialization and in the ability of humanity to solve far worse problems than climate change.
In the meantime, you may want to stockpile your Allegra, Nasacort, and Neo-Synephrine. You never know when climate change will strike.
Read more at Breitbart
Where I grew up – Morris, Minnesota – we had a small ghost forest. During the dust bowl era a lake dried up, and trees grew where it once was. Then the dust bowl went away, and the lake returned. There were dead trees everywhere in that lake, until a friend of mine decided they were ugly and rooted them out. But that was before we went and changed the climate. Do we have to pay reparations anyway?
Uh, I am allergic to virtually all airborne allergens. I live in SW CT, and have all my life except schooling. First, Spring is way late here. and news from VT ski areas last week is that it still is winter up there. Second is that I have been on immunotherapy for most of my life and will be on it for the rest of my life due to associated asthma. So I know my nose. I know the seasons well. There is not much new under the Sun that impacts allergies. It varies year to year, but in my experience only weather impacts it each year, not climate whatever. But there is a human impact. We have more deer due to human impact. We have more variety of plants due to human imports of plants from other places (really dumb!) And we have less understory and variety due to deer eating it all. So yes, a human impact, but not a climate whatever. Best to all who read this. H
“Eco-Modernist”. I like that one. Puts the hysterical climatistas back in the 1880’s where they and the CO2 science belongs.
Greens oppose flowering plants. What’s next?
Ok, well here in Minnesota they said it’s the coldest start to April since records began, so the pollen here is pretty low now, but the plants look like Popeye ready to burst from all of that CO2 they’ve been absorbing. I’m gonna go get some Nasacort….
This is a no-brainer. The dominate factor here is the increase in CO2. We are just just now entering the healthy zones for most plant species and they are responding with much higher growth rates and much increased seed and pollen production. The plant kingdom is thriving, but unfortunately we humans now have to adapt as well. One the plus side, our food production is thriving as well.
The term “climate change” is semantically empty.
Anyone who uses it, like the CBS folk, are intellectually content free.
….”When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone,
……“it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
We have 300,000 years of genetic and behavioral selection:
…using ambiguous phraseology is simple minded.
It is time to drag out the ol’ chart: climate change only causes undesirable things, and never causes desirable changes. It couldn’t be less allergies. Because Climate Change.
Funny thing is, here in Norway spring is generally a couple of weeks earlier now than it used to be during the frigid seventies. And with that earlier spring, the pollen season has been stretched out more than before, it starts earlier but it is less intense and lasting longer.
This year is different. Because of the colder winter we had, with more snow cover later into spring, we are now ‘enjoying’ nature coming back to life – right now, all over, in a very short period of time. Pollen is intense now, and allergics are suffering more.
I am particulalry allergic to dandelion pollen. Luckily, the dandelion blossoming has come in parallell with cold weather the last 6-7 years, which means pollen has been less and the air has been cleaned by frequent showers. It will be interesting to see what happens this year.
On the greening side of things, Norway is much ‘greener’ now than 40 years ago. It is certainly due to CO2 fertilization, but also due to the fact that grazing animals are a lot fewer and further between. Mountain roads that used to have tremendous views are now grown in by dense vegetation.
I have attempted to explain the immunological cause of increase of allergies and other western diseases such as autism, cardiovascular disease, and depression in my recently published book ‘The Kindness of Human Milk’. http://myBook.to/TheKindness I think this may add another perspective to the issues discussed.
Gee, I thought folks here on WUWT thought Scientific American was a junk-filled publication. Or does that only apply then the articles say that AGW is real and requires action?
John Horgan’s essay in no way addresses the allergy prediction made in the CBS News story. It’s just states that mankind has adapted to problems through technology in the past, and that will continue. I’m not sure how that same thinking can be applied to increased allergy problems.
What type of climate change is doing that.
Is it higher temperatures, lower temperatures, more rain, less rain, more wind or less wind, more sunshine or less, more winter snow or less.
If you notice some changes and only to the worse, blame it on CLIMATE CHANGE.
Have you ever heard that some good was coused by climate change?
I think this is an example, and I’ve seen a few of them lately, of an anti-alarmist paper in disguise. I think a lot of scientists are finally coming around to our side (the skeptical side) of the debate, but realize they can’t get skeptical papers published because most of the journal editors are alarmists (and the ones that aren’t won’t be around long thanks to targeting by alarmists, as revealed in the ClimateGate emails). Or worse, they might lose their jobs if they “come out” as skeptics. So they try to find some result of global warming that is, on the surface, a bad thing, but if you dig just below the surface, you find that there’s something even bigger, on the good side. In this case, the “bad” thing, the thing that got the article past the gatekeepers, was the increase in allergens. But of course, for there to be more allergens, there has to be more plants (which the author mentioned in passing, but didn’t explore in its own right), and if there are more plants, that will reduce the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, thus acting as a negative feedback to warming (which the author, I assume, didn’t mention at all, but anyone with half a brain can figure out.)
What remains to be seen is whether these skeptical papers disguised as alarmist papers are just individual scientists trying to keep their positions (“publish or perish”), or part of a growing counter-conspiracy to gradually destroy the CAGW conspiracy from the inside.