What black mold and climate change have in common - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

What black mold and climate change have in common - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

...Consider allergy season. When the temperatures rise, plants produce more pollen. Not only do seasons now start 20 days earlier than they did in 1990, there’s about 20% more pollen filling the air, largely thanks to climate change. “If you’ve sensed that your allergies are getting worse each year, it’s not your imagination,” Lisa Jarvis writes. In the US, a quarter of adults and nearly 20% of children are impacted by allergies, a figure that’s set to grow as the world gets hotter.

When the lungs are aggravated by pollen, Lisa says, “it’s downright dangerous for people with asthma: An analysis of asthma patients Maryland found that very early-onset spring led to a 17% increase in hospitalizations.” And you know what worsens people’s asthma? Climate change, doh!

Mark Gongloff says the wildfire season in Canada is set to “start sooner and end later and potentially be more explosive” than last year. “Children, senior citizens and people with asthma and other underlying health issues can be harmed by relatively low concentrations of wildfire smoke,” he writes, but the “toxic stew of chemicals, delivered in particles small enough to enter the bloodstream” is dangerous for us all.

The costs associated with climate-caused health complications are not insignificant. Sweden, for instance, found that allergies cost the country of 9.5 million people upwards of 1.3 billion euros per year, thanks to treatments, doctors’ visits and hospitalizations. And in the US, wildfire fumes could cause as many as 27,800 US deaths per year by 2050 — an annual economic cost of $244 billion.