The everyday ways climate change is already making our lives worse

When you think of threats from climate change, you probably envision flooding and wind from supercharged hurricanes, or unprecedented heatwaves. A survey of people in the US from late 2024 found that the majority of people see extreme weather as the greatest climate-related danger. But there are a slew of more persistent ways climate change is disrupting our day-to-day experiences.

“These are the kinds of events that affect people’s lives but don’t necessarily make the news,” says Jennifer Carman at Yale University.

While these more mundane impacts of climate change – such as worse allergies or longer commute times – might seem to pale in comparison to climate disasters, they can add up to represent a big shift, says Carman. Knowing about them can also help people prepare for how climate change will affect their lives. After all, about half of Americans now report they have personally experienced climate change, twice as many as a decade ago.

“Extreme events won’t affect everyone,” says Carman. “But people are experiencing everyday effects every day.”

Climate change is driving up the cost of food – and everything else

Hotter temperatures due to climate change contribute to price inflation. Friderike Kuik at the European Central Bank and her colleagues analysed links between changing temperatures and thousands of price indices from around the world. Across the board, they found that higher average temperatures – not just extreme events – lead to inflation. This was especially true in regions closer to the equator, where the effect persists year round.

They projected that by 2035, hotter temperatures will drive annual price inflation across a range of goods by 0.5 per cent to 1.2 percent, depending on the amount of greenhouse gases the world emits. The effect is about twice as large for food prices because agriculture is particularly vulnerable to changing weather. “All of this unpredictability makes it harder to grow food,” says Carman.

Air conditioning is becoming more common – and expensive

Higher temperatures also increase air conditioning costs. In hot places, those that have air conditioning have to run it longer and more often for the same cooling effect. This can often increase energy bills beyond what people can afford.

People living in places that were once cool enough to get by without air conditioning, such as London or the Pacific Northwest in the US, are now having to install it for the first time. In most of the world, the increased cost of cooling wipes out any reduced heating costs.

We’re sleeping less because of rising temperatures

Even when we can crank the air conditioning, hotter temperatures overnight can disrupt our sleep. Renjie Chen at Fudan University in China and his colleagues analysed more than 20 million nights worth of sleep monitoring data from hundreds of thousands of people in China. They found that a 10°C rise in temperature on a given night made it 20 per cent more likely someone wouldn’t get sufficient sleep. With climate change under a worst-case emissions scenario, they estimated higher temperatures could amount to each person in China losing about 33 hours of sleep per year by the end of the century.

This is a worldwide issue. Kelton Minor at Columbia University in New York and his colleagues looked at links between ambient nighttime temperature and sleep data from tens of thousands of people across 68 countries. They found higher nighttime temperatures reduce the amount of sleep people get across the board, mainly by delaying when people fall asleep. However, the effect was most significant for people in poor or hotter countries, as well as for older people and women.

Climate change is boosting air pollution and making it more harmful

Air pollution, whether it’s tiny particles of PM2.5 or ozone, is harmful for human health. Recent studies have found that the effects of this ambient pollution can be even worse when combined with higher temperatures, either due to heat changing the mix of pollutants in the air, or people spending more time outside.

Rising temperatures can also boost air pollution by surging demand for electricity to power air conditioning (see above), which can kick on electricity generation at what are called “peaker plants”. These are high-emitting power plants designed to meet peak demand, and are some of the dirtiest fossil fuel power plants.

Pollution from burning fossil fuels in general has fallen as the power grid has gotten cleaner, which should be a boon for public health. But decades of progress there could be reversed by more frequent exposure to wildfire smoke as climate change fuels more intense and more frequent fires. One study found that increased exposure to this smoke could lead to around 700,000 additional deaths in the US by 2050.

Allergies are getting worse as the world warms

Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are also leading to longer warm seasons and more pollen production, which is boosting allergies. And people are noticing. Carman says this has turned up in the data from their annual survey, with 38 per cent of respondents reporting that allergy season is getting worse.

The data supports what people’s sniffles are telling them. William Anderegg at the University of Utah and his colleagues found that pollen season in North America has lengthened by an average of 20 days since the 1990s, with a 21 per cent increase in the amount of pollen in the air. They attribute most of this change to human-caused warming.

Travel is taking longer, whether it’s a long-haul flight or daily commute

Climate change is increasingly causing weather-related delays on transportation systems, leading to billions of hours of wasted time.

For instance, Valerie Mueller at Arizona State University and her colleagues looked at how regular coastal flooding is affecting commute times in the eastern US. They estimated that the average person driving to work there now sees about 23 minutes of delays per year due to these floods – double the amount two decades ago. In their analysis, they screened out the extreme flooding from storm surge, so this is mainly due to sea level rise.

While a couple dozen extra minutes commuting over a whole year may not seem like all that much, it amounts to billions of hours of lost time on the whole. In the coming decades, further sea level rise could multiply that to hundreds of minutes per year per person, they found.

Weather-related delays are also rising for train systems and at airports. For instance, the International Air Transport Association reports that weather-related delays rose from 11 per cent of overall delays in 2012 to 30 per cent of delays in 2023. And even when you are able to board, your flight may be bumpier, with climate change boosting certain forms of turbulence.