The Natural Resources Defense Council is out with a report linking human-caused climate change with allergies, asthma and other breathing problems. It starts right out with a debatable point: “2014 was the hottest year on Earth since recordkeeping began in 1880, and ten of the previous warmest years on record occurred since 2001.”
Here’s a rebuttal. (There are others if you care to look.) But I digress.
The NRDC report blames much of the discomfort many New Englanders are enduring this spring on global warming that causes trees and ragweed to produce pollen longer and in greater quantities than before.
But that isn’t the only factor. Here, courtesy of The Boston Globe, is a big one:
Today, 80 percent of New England is covered by forest or thick woods. That is a far cry from the mere 30 to 40 percent that remained forested in most parts of the region in the mid-1800s, after early waves of settlers got done with their vast logging, farming, and leveling operations.
According to Harvard research, New England is now the most heavily forested region in the United States — a recovery that the great naturalist Henry David Thoreau once thought impossible.
Climatistas, wildlife aficionados and Mother Earthers like to point out that the forests are being pushed aside for houses, factories and the like. (They always bring that up when a suburban homeowner has an encounter with a bear.) If only it were true. Not many factories are being built in New England these days. And if you read the Globe story, you’ll learn that many residential developments are, for all intents and purposes, forests. I know mine is. Originally developed in the mid-1950s, it’s got lots and lots of trees. My half-acre-plus lot alone has more than a dozen mature deciduous trees and an equal number of mature evergreens.
I visited an allergist a few years ago — right about the time the wonder drug Claritin hit the market as a prescription medicine — and was told I’m allergic to certain types of tree pollen, including oak and birch. And why do you suppose I was having trouble with seasonal allergies that hadn’t bothered me when I lived farther north and in the semi-arid West? Global warming? No, reforestation — and the fact I moved, of my own free will, to a climate that triggered my allergies.
In addition to the new trees growing in previously cleared areas, the old trees are bigger and producing more pollen than before. You know what? If New England forests were cleared back to 1850 levels tomorrow, a lot of us wouldn’t be having trouble with allergies and asthma. People like me, with relatively mild allergies, probably wouldn’t even need to choke down a Claritin tablet every day during the peak pollen-producing period.
So, no, NRDC, I’m not buying the global-warming theory as regards allergies and asthma. (And by the way, I’m a global-warming skeptic, not denier, and I believe wholeheartedly in climate change, having failed to observe much of it in my own short life but having read about documented, vast changes in climate over geological time.)
