Big culprit for allergies?

USA TODAY, September, 2008 by Kim Painter

If you have respiratory allergies, you have an environmental problem: There's something in the air that makes you sniffle, sneeze, stuff up or wheeze.

And growing evidence suggests your problem may be linked with the biggest environmental problem of all: global climate change.

That may be especially true for pollen sufferers. Tree, grasses and weeds (including the ragweed tormenting many people right now) churn out more pollen over more weeks when temperatures and carbon dioxide levels rise, says Richard Weber, a Denver allergist who helped write a paper on the link published this month in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

"I think we can expect allergy sufferers are going to be suffering more," says Weber, a professor at the...