Unless you’ve been living under a rock or in a hermetically sealed room, you’ve likely noticed that a blanket of pollen has descended on the mountains over the past 2 weeks — coating everything it’s touched in yellow powder + leaving us sneezing.
If you’ve started to notice that each year’s pollen amount seems to be getting worse than what you remember as a kid, you’re not wrong.
According to a study done this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA , climate change is making pollen seasons longer and heavier. In fact, the sneezin’ seasons are now 10 days longer than they were in 1990, and trees are producing 21% more pollen.
As a seasonal allergy sufferer, I found this info to be both fascinating + horrifying, so I reached out to Dr. Jennifer Rhode Ward , Professor of Biology at UNC Asheville , for the scoop on the correlation between climate change + increased pollen. Here’s what she told me.
Climate change has altered plants’ phenology (a.k.a., the timing of plant growth + development) so that pollen season is starting earlier and lasting longer, explains Jennifer. And because the climate of Southern Appalachia is now hotter and wetter, it has transformed into a climate that’s more hospitable for a greater number of species — making for a higher volume of pollen producers.
Don’t despair entirely, though, because we’ve also got some ironically good news — the same masks we wear to protect ourselves from coronavirus can also help protect us from those irritants that cause us misery. “Even a single layer cloth mask provides a barrier between you and pollen,” Jennifer says.
And while we don’t know when it will be safe to forego masks, more good news is that according to Zaynab Nasif , a spokeswoman for the NC Department of Environmental Quality, the highest pollen counts are usually recorded between the last week of March and the second week of April — so the air should be clearing up soon. Talk about breathing a sigh of relief.
Want allergenic info that doesn’t involve venturing outdoors? Breathe easy and check out this Twitter account
and this website
for daily pollen updates, and click here
for a list of NC curated tips for surviving the season.