Ragweed may boom with global warming

An experiment in which infrared heaters warmed ragweed on an Oklahoma prairie suggests that climate change actually is something to sneeze at.

Artificially warming a plot yielded extra ragweed plants, say Shiqiang Wan and his colleagues from the University of Oklahoma in Norman. The effect boosted pollen production 84 percent compared with unheated plots, the researchers report in the November 2002 American Journal of Botany.