The climate continues to be a seen and unseen disaster for those with allergies. While national and government agendas like the Paris Agreement and Environmental Protection Agency seem impersonal to the average American citizen, understanding how the changing climate affects people individually is key to understanding the communal effect of climate change on our environments around us. These governmental agreements help to keep the Earth on a somewhat stable path, as without oversight emissions levels would continue to skyrocket among developed countries. Instead of submitting to hopelessness, climate-saving actions begin in local communities and spread outwards.
As spring continues to get warmer and warmer, plants start producing pollen earlier in the year. This warmth, combined with rising carbon dioxide levels, are key to understanding how global warming affects our environment on a macro and micro scale. While allergy symptoms differ from person to person, the most common symptoms are runny nose, coughing, and congestion. Ragweed is the most common plant in North America that causes fever and can trigger asthma attacks for immunocompromised individuals.
“My winter allergies have gotten longer and more hectic. I used to be fine with one or two Allegra, but now I have to overload on allergy medication as well as Mucinex to hold my own nowadays. It’s the kind of thing that makes me want to not go outside and stay in bed all day.” Amanda Edmunds, my sister and interview subject is fidgety when I come home to email her about how she’s been personally affected by the changing lengths in seasons due to global warming. It’s a forty minute train ride, and we both look disheveled. I’m wearing a blue polo and khakis while she wears jeans and a pink button up.
A single ragweed plant can produce a billion pollen spores per allergy season, which is carried throughout the US through wind patterns. My sister shares her symptoms with the eighty-one million other Americans who suffer from seasonal pollen allergies. Her itchy eyes limit her mobility, her coughing and sneezing limits how well she can communicate, and her lifestyle is transformed by the wind patterns and temperature changes.
Tiktok videos show people frolicking in the Swiss Alps through meadows and mountains without a care in the world. Resident travel advisors offer stunning deals on round trips to Korea and back. Tiktok user @eatsandhangovers provides stunningly detailed observations about the best tips and supplies for backpacking in Europe. These tips are lovely and applicable but refuse to account how pollen and temperature changes may make these videos one day obsolete. The world, in becoming more globalized and individual-centric, forgets the basic constant necessary for travel: individuals and seasons.
As the final frost of spring comes earlier and earlier, summers are getting longer while other seasons are shrinking. The American Geophysical Union reviewed historical climate data from 1952–2011 and found “summer grew from 78 to 95 days as winter shrank from 76 to 73 days.” Their studies conclude that by 2100 winter will last two months and summer could be up to half a year. Horrific for humans as well as devastating for the environment, these changes are forcing animals to adapt in unconventional ways. Birds are forced to change their migrating patterns.
Wildfires and heatwaves, winter storms and hurricanes. These are environmental calamities that are becoming more common and dangerous. Reforestation and increasing tree coverage in urban areas like New Brunswick mitigate carbon levels and is a relatively inexpensive solution for carbon and pollen removal. History repeats itself only if the individuals who make a community allow it to. The sneezing and coughing relegated by seasons has now become a yearwide phenomenon, and allergy sufferers like my sister’s lives will only get worse if global warming persists without a curtailing of fossil fuels. Community activism, as well as individual choices, are society’s main hope against leaving an inhospitable planet for our children.
Sources:
- Environmental Protection Agency. (n.d.). EPA. Retrieved April 3, 2023, from https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases
2. Northern Hemisphere summers may last nearly half the year by 2100. AGU Newsroom. (2021, March 17). Retrieved April 3, 2023, from https://news.agu.org/press-release/northern-hemisphere-summers-may-last-nearly-half-the-year-by-2100/
3. Mulligan, J., Ellison, G., Levin, K., Lebling, K., Rudee, A., & Leslie-Bole, H. (2023, March 17). 6 ways to remove carbon pollution from the atmosphere. World Resources Institute. Retrieved April 5, 2023, from https://www.wri.org/insights/6-ways-remove-carbon-pollution-sky
