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.