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It's hard to relate to climate change. Even the prospect of a couple of polar bears treading water in a frigid, far-off sea is still a bit, well, irrelevant when you're late for work and the Jubilee line's down yet again.

But an (sandwiched, rather unfairly, between the cryptic crossword and the weather forecast) has thrown the threat of climate change into sharper, far more terrifying relief: it's going to make your hayfever worse.

By favouring plants that produce hayfever-inducing pollen, climate change is going to make your (not to mention commuting on the Jubilee line even less jubilant.)

'Climate change is making things worse', Mr Plester writes in the Weatherwatch column. 'The pollen season is tending to grow longer as rising temperatures encourage earlier flowering of trees such as birch, alder and hazel, which can all set off hayfever. And the grass season is lengthening - 20 years ago grass pollen would finish by the end of July, but now it can last well into mid-August.'

Could scratchy eyes be a metaphor for our response to climate change? As Helen Kelller put it: 'The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.'

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