Context and Location Matters, USA Today and Others, Longer Allergy Season Has an Upside

Guest essay by H. Sterling Burnett via ClimateRealism.com

Recently, a host of media outlets ran stories, typical for this time of year, blaming climate change for making allergy seasons worse. This, although both true and false, misses the larger context. Climate change has resulted in longer allergy seasons in recent decades, with the season especially longer in urban and suburban areas experiencing a significant urban health island effect. Allergy sufferers are experiencing symptoms for a slightly extended period of time, spending more on allergy medicine, but that’s not the whole story. The longer growing season has been a boon for plants, insects, and animals, as well as benefiting crop production. In context, one could argue the extra sneezing and watery eyes experienced by some is a worthwhile trade off to receive the benefits of a greener world.

Every year at this time, myriad media outlets run stories on the allergy season and what steps people with allergies can take to alleviate their suffering. In recent years, there has been a twist to the story, tying extended allergy seasons to climate change. This year is no exception. Already, national publications like USA Today and regional newspapers, such as the Augusta Chronicle and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review have run articles tying longer allergy seasons to climate change, each referencing the same study by the climate activist group, Climate Central.

USA Today’s article, titled “Warming trends could make allergy season last longer in Atlanta. Why?,” opens with a series of AI generated talking points:

• Climate Central’s March 4 report links climate change to earlier, longer and worse allergy seasons for millions of Americans, including one in five children.
• Between 1970 and 2025, the average freeze‑free season grew by 21 days nationwide and by 19 days in the southeast, creating a 136‑day window without freezes.
• The freeze‑free season lengthened in 87 percent of the 198 cities studied, adding roughly three weeks of growing time to most U.S. cities since 1970.

“It’s that time of year where the tulips start blooming in our gardens and the flowers of the peach trees are bright and pink,” writes Irene Wright for USA Today. “Then our cars all turn yellow from driving through the pollen-dense air.

“For many, springtime is less about the start of new life, but rather the start of an exhausting seasonal allergy season that seems to get longer and longer each year,” Wright continues. “There is some truth to that, according to a new report from Climate Central.”

While there is a modicum of truth to Climate Central’s claim, it isn’t new or groundbreaking news. Dozens of similar stories have been published each spring for the past decade or two. Even when certain salient points are made in these stories, they almost uniformly ignore the important implication for the climate change link and the critical broader beneficial contexts for species in general.

As Climate Central’s study notes, the “freeze-free” season has come earlier and lasted longer especially in the nation’s cities. That’s not due to climate change having some unique impact on urban locations, which more rural areas don’t experience. No, its due to the built-up environment in cities with artificial sources of heat and formerly open areas like pastures, fields, and forests, now covered with buildings and concrete that retain and slowly release heat at night. That’s the urban heat island effect, which research shows  tends to raise urban temperatures as much as several degrees above surrounding areas. The result, trees, flowers, and grasses – all that built-up landscaping – bloom earlier. The pollen from that starts the allergy season earlier.

Still, even rural areas have experienced a modest extension of the growing season with fewer frost events as a result of modest average warming. But this is good news, not bad, both for reasons of human and environmental health and flourishing.

Cold temperatures kill far more people each year than hot temperatures, by about 10 to one. This has meant that as the Earth as modestly warmed the number of people dying due to non-optimum temperatures had fallen dramatically as discussed at Climate at a Glance: Temperature Related Deaths and many more Climate Realism posts. Essentially, early springa are resulting in fewer deaths from cold.

In addition, the decline in late-season frost events has contributed to record setting crop rotations, yields, and production in the United States and around the globe. Fewer hungry people and more people having access to nutritious foods is also a good thing.

Aside from the direct benefits to human life and crop production, as explored in numerous Climate Realism posts from prior allergy seasons, the lengthier growing seasons have resulted in a greening of the Earth and improved habitat conditions for wildlife and pollinating insects. Moreover, longer lasting, flowering plants producing nectar and pollen is good for all sorts of insects, not the least among them bees, but also various species of bats and birds, such as hummingbirds.

In the end, life is about trade-offs. More pollen may aggravate allergies and asthma, but few would argue that a world with declining plant life is better than a world with more abundant plant life.

Focusing on a drawback of a greener world, worsening allergies, while ignoring its broad benefits of more trees, shrubs, grasses, flowers, and food crops, represents poor journalism. Global greening has contributed to the largest decline in global hunger in history, and the greater plant growth not only removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but the allergy causing pollen it emits is great for pollinating insects like bees, and birds. Most people would likely agree that harsher allergies, while unwelcome, are a small price to pay for a more fecund world. Perhaps, if and when mainstream media outlets like USA Today, the Augusta Chronicle, and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review write on this topic in the future, they might provide a balanced examination of the reasons for extended allergy seasons in cities – which is not primarily global warming – and of the benefits as well as the costs resulting from longer growing seasons.