No, Axios, climate change hasn't made Atlanta's allergic season worse – what about Watt?

By Heartland Institute

By Anthony Watts and Sterling Burnett

Axios Atlanta recently published an article titled “Atlanta’s pollen season is getting worse due to climate change,” claiming that the allergic season is getting worse due to climate change. Axios' article is misleading at best and misses a bigger point of view. Data and historical trends show that despite fluctuations in pollen levels, factors such as urbanization and land use changes (especially the urban heat island (UHI) effect) are more important than what it calls local climate change.

“The warm climate means that allergy season starts early and lasts longer,” Kristal Dixon and Alex Fitzpatrick wrote for Axios. “Longer, warmer growing seasons can lead to earlier pollen releases and higher overall pollen levels.”

Dixon and Fitzpatrick overlooked several key facts in an attempt to link long-term climate change to longer allergic seasons. For example, Atlanta's well-documented urban heat island effect (the effect caused by dense infrastructure, concrete and asphalt trapping heat) plays a much greater role in local temperature trends than any global warming impact. Over the past few decades, the city has expanded significantly, increasing local temperatures and extending the growing season for plants.

According to NASA's analysis of the UHI effect of Atlanta, the city's temperature is always much higher than that of the surrounding rural areas because of the artificially manufactured structure retaining heat. This local warming (not global climate change) is a key driver of temperature-related transfers during the pollen cycle.

Second, pollen levels are severely affected by regional vegetation patterns and fertilization effects, resulting in healthier plant growth.

As pointed out in one Climate Realism Article, pollen season depends largely on precipitation levels and natural climate change, not just temperature. When more rainfall occurs, plants produce more pollen. On the contrary, drought can inhibit pollen levels. Climate models cannot reliably explain these local and regional factors, but Axios raises the question as if it was completely driven by global temperature changes.

Furthermore, previous claims about worsening allergy season deterioration have not been scrutinized. For example, in 2022 Climate Realism Analysis by showing that pollen trends vary by region and that certain areas are actually experiencing similar assertions Fewer Not much pollen. Furthermore, studies cited in mainstream media often rely on cherry picking data on a limited time frame rather than examining long-term historical trends.

Axios Embraces Climate Center uses “continuous freezing days” as agent for pollen season, noting that between 1970 and 2024, the number of consecutive freezing days increased IT cities such as Reno, Myrtle Beach and Toledo. Interestingly, in those cities, whether sales of allergic treatment or allergic medicine increased in those cities corresponding to the increase in the number of days between freezing temperatures, no data was provided. And, while climate change is a supposedly global phenomenon, it turns out that the number of days of continuous freezing has decreased, so the logical question to be raised is that allergic attacks or sales of allergic medicine, as agents, has also declined. If Axios asked these questions, there is certainly no answer to them in the article, but if someone asks if climate change affects allergies, it's a reasonable connection.

Even climate change is contrary to other factors, which leads to longer allergic seasons, which ignores the larger view of the positive benefits of falling freezing temperatures. Axios' story mentions a pass but fails to expand its writing,”[a]Bove freezing temperature can improve plant growth. As Axios notes, while the pain of allergic patients should not be ignored, allergies are treatable, but are less beneficial to plants, pollinating insects and humans during frozen days and nights.

For example, climate realism raises this in repetitive posts, here, here and here. Global greening has led to the biggest decline of global hunger in history. Larger plant growth not only removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but also causes pollen allergies is very useful for pollination of insects such as bees and birds.

More directly, a large number of peer review reports confirm that cold temperatures are 10 times the cause of high temperatures. As a result, as the number of frozen days decreases, deaths attributed to non-maximum temperatures also drop sharply, preventing hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. (See the table below, below)

Rather than adopting a broad, evidence-based approach, Axios attempts to link worsening allergies to climate change, and again it resorts to the claims of alarmists without addressing all relevant factors. Allergy season in Atlanta is affected by many variables, including land use changes, dense urban landscapes with pollen production plants, increasing green spaces and urbanization. Blaming climate change without considering these other effects can mislead the public and cause unnecessary panic. If the media is really interested in public notifications, they should focus on all the contributing factors that can lead to longer allergic seasons. They can also discuss the huge global net gains of less frozen days.

Heartland Research Institute

Heartland Institute is one of the world's leading free market think tanks. It is a national nonprofit research and education organization located in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Its mission is to discover, develop and promote free market solutions to social and economic problems.

Originally published in ClimateRealism

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