Archives for February 2021

When Dr. Stanley Fineman started as an allergist in Atlanta, he told patients they should start taking their medications and prepare for the drippy, sneezy onslaught of pollen season around St. Patrick’s Day. That was about 40 years ago. Now he tells them to start around St. Valentine’s Day.

Across the United States and Canada, pollen season is starting 20 days earlier and pollen loads are 21% higher since 1990 and a huge chunk of that is because of global warming, a new study found in Monday’s journal the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

While other studies have shown North America’s allergy season getting longer and worse, this is the most comprehensive data with 60 reporting stations and the first to make the required and detailed calculations that could attribute what’s happening to human-caused climate change, experts said.

“This is a crystal clear example that climate change is here and it’s in every breath we take,” said lead author Bill Anderegg, a biologist and climate scientist at the University of Utah, who also has “really bad allergies.”

Chris Downs, a 32-year-old mechanical engineer in St. Louis, is already getting sinus problems, headaches and worst of all itchy red eyes — and his Facebook friends in the area tell him they’re feeling the same. He said the allergies, which started 22 years ago, usually hit in March, but this year and last year, they were already around in early February, along with blooms of trees and flowers outside.

“As a kid I never saw anything start blooming in February, now I see a handful of years like that,” Downs said.

The warmer the Earth gets, the earlier spring starts for plants and animals, especially those that release pollen. Add to that the fact that trees and plants produce more pollen when they get carbon dioxide, the study said.

“This is clearly warming temperatures and more carbon dioxide putting more pollen in the air,” Anderegg said. Trees are spewing the allergy-causing particles earlier than grasses, he said, but scientists aren’t sure why that’s the case. Just look at cherry blossoms opening several days earlier in Japan and Washington, D.C., he said.

Texas is where some of the biggest changes are happening, Anderegg said. The South and southern Midwest are getting pollen season about 1.3 days earlier each year, while it’s coming about 1.1 days earlier in the West, he said. The northern Midwest is getting allergy season about 0.65 days earlier per year, and it’s coming 0.33 days earlier a year in the Southeast. In Canada, Alaska and the Northeast researchers couldn’t see a statistically significant trend.

Anderegg said his team factored that in that parks and plants in cities were getting greener. They did standard detailed calculations that scientists have developed to see if changes in nature can be attributed to the increase of heat-trapping gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. They compared what’s happening now to computer simulations of an Earth without human-caused warming and rising carbon dioxide in the air.

Since 1990, about half of the earlier pollen season can be attributed to climate change — mostly from the warmer temperatures — but also from the plant-feeding carbon dioxide, Anderegg said. But since the 2000s, about 65% of earlier pollen seasons can be blamed on warming, he said. About 8% of the increased pollen load can be attributed to climate change, he said.

Dr. Fineman, past president of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology and who wasn’t part of the study, said this makes sense and fits with what he sees: “Pollen really follows the temperature. There’s not a question.”

While doctors and scientists knew earlier allergy season was happening, until now no one had done formal climate attribution studies to help understand why, said University of Washington environmental health professor Kristie Ebi, who wasn’t part of the study. This can help scientists estimate how many allergies and asthma cases “could be due to climate change,” she said.

This is not just a matter of sniffles.

“We should care about pollen season because pollen is an important risk factor for allergic diseases such as hay fever and asthma exacerbation,” said University of Maryland environmental health professor Amir Sapkota, who wasn’t part of the study. “Asthma costs the U.S. economy an estimated $80 billion per year in terms of treatment and loss of productivity. So a longer pollen season poses real threats to individuals suffering from allergy as well as the U.S. economy.”

Sapkota recently found a correlation between earlier spring onset and increase risk in asthma hospitalizations. One study found students do worse on tests because of pollen levels, Anderegg said.

Gene Longenecker, a hazards geographer who recently returned to Alabama, didn’t really suffer from pollen allergies until he moved to Atlanta. Then he moved to Colorado: “Every summer it was just crushing headaches and big things like that and (I) started into allergy testing and found out that, well, I’m allergic to everything in Colorado — at the very least trees, grasses and pollens, weeds.”

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Read stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Copyright © 2021 . All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

Passenger traffic on U.S. airlines has dropped again to levels not seen in a couple decades, but Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian thinks there will be a summer surge, at least within the United States.

Like many others in the airline industry, Bastian favors testing international travelers for COVID-19, which he sees as a way to remove other border restrictions, but he is dead-set against testing people before domestic flights, fearing it will cause another disastrous drop in leisure travel.

On the pandemic, Bastian expects a stronger federal response under new President Joe Biden that will help the travel industry.

Bastian talked recently to The Associated Press about these and other issues facing airlines. The answers have been edited for length.

Q: Summer is coming, a critical time for airlines. What do you expect from the peak vacation-travel season?

A: In the spring, people will be making bookings for the upcoming summer, making plans accordingly, and we expect that to start opening up again. They are not booking in large numbers yet, but they are looking — looks are up meaningfully.

Q: You’ve even said you expect a travel “surge” this summer. Most people seem to think the recovery will be gradual.

A: Honestly, from where we’re at even a gradual ramp-up will feel like a surge.

Q: How much international travel do you expect this summer?

A: It will be better than last year. How’s that for a starter? That’s a very low bar. I think it’s going to take easily another 12 to 18 months before we see international back at scale.

Q: How important is testing passengers for COVID-19 to allow more international travel?

A: Testing is the key to opening up international markets and borders, so I welcome the testing that the (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is asking for (a negative test before travelers enter the U.S.). Testing is going to be an important step to reestablishing consumer confidence, and as that confidence builds, I think you can see those (border) restrictions come down.

Q: The CDC is considering requiring testing before people can get on domestic flights. What do you think about that?

A: I don’t anticipate that is coming. I certainly hope not. The level of travel that we are carrying domestically in the U.S. — not just Delta, but across the industry — would be substantially reduced from today’s already low levels if domestic testing was required. And we don’t have the facility or the technology or capabilities to be administering or monitoring domestic testing.

Q: What about business travel? How much smaller will that be after the pandemic?

A: Maybe 10% to 20% smaller. Video technology clearly is going to take some amount of demand out. Today (business travel) is about 10% to 15% of what it was. Maybe by the second half of the year we would be 25% to 50% of what it was. A nice step up, but still it’s going to take some time. Small business is picking up faster than large business.

Q. Delta is blocking middle seats for a little while longer and has stepped up cleaning plane cabins. Do passengers value those things, and is that just temporary — will they go back to just buying the cheapest flight?

A: I don’t think any of us are going to forget what we’ve been through. We already see evidence on that in the current results. Relative to United (which never blocked any seats), we generated more passenger revenue. That’s a demonstration that customers are opting for the type of the service that Delta is providing. We’re finding that customers are quite willing to pay a premium to be with with a service provider who’s got wellness at the top of their priority list.

Q: Will any more airlines go out of business because of the pandemic?

A: In the U.S., I don’t foresee any, certainly not in the near term. I think the U.S. government support through the CARES Act and has enabled us all to stabilize our businesses. Internationally yes, I do see there being continued restructurings, consolidations, potential liquidations, pretty significant impacts, primarily not just because the international borders have not been open, but also many of the international governments have not provided their airlines the level of support the U.S. government placed with our industry.

Q: You have reduced Delta’s cash burn but you are still projecting a loss of $10 million to $15 million a day in the first quarter. Can you get to break-even by spring?

A: I think so, and that’s still our forecast, our goal. We’re seeing some revenue improvement … and I don’t think that’s a big step to go from $12 million a day to break-even. You fast-forward 90 to 120 days from now and the environment — hopefully the vaccines will be distributed at a much heightened higher level, that the virus will be a much more contained level, and people will be ready to get on with their life.

Q: We’ve got a new president. How do you think the Biden administration will treat airlines?

A: I expect the administration is going to be very focused on the health of the airline industry and getting us back to health. We are a vital cog in our nation’s economy. We are a job creator. I think they will be very sensitive to ensuring that there are no additional challenges put in our way of returning to health. The other thing that is most important is the federal coordination and support to get the virus under control. I think they will have a stronger voice as compared to the patchwork (during the Trump administration) with 50 states making decisions around travel and quarantine and vaccine deployment and testing and the like. So I’m looking forward to that.

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David Koenig can be reached at www.twitter.com/airlinewriter

Copyright © 2021 . All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.