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An American forest scientist has identified a new and scary face of global warming for Ottawa residents: Not drought or pestilence, but bigger and badder poison ivy.

Lee Frelich is a big name in the field of forecasting what climate change will do to forest species. He teaches at the University of Minnesota, and has been in the forest research business since the late 1970s. He knows Ontario’s forests too.

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And he says there’s firm evidence that poison ivy will thrive in our expected future climate.

Climate change “will favour poison ivy quite dramatically,” he said in an interview. “Poison ivy is one of the few species that has a direct response to rising carbon dioxide levels.”

Climate change is caused by rising levels of various gases in the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide from burning fuels.

The carbon in carbon dioxide is one of the raw materials that plants need to grow, and many plants extract it from the air through pores in their leaves, called stomata.