Now that it's past Memorial Day and you can officially sport those white linen pants, it's time to worry about all the unwanted side effects of summer: things like mosquitos, ticks, and the camper's sworn enemy, poison ivy. And according to a study published this week, poison ivy just might be coming your way in a nastier variety, thanks to increasing carbon dioxide emissions.

Researchers at Duke University found that higher levels of CO2 cause the poison ivy vine to grow more quickly, grow bigger, and produce more of the chemical that brings on nasty itchy rashes.

Duke scientists have been fertilizing circular patches of forest with carbon dioxide for the last decade in an attempt to understand how increased levels of CO2 in the air might affect certain types of forests. The experimental sites are in a loblolly pine forest in North Carolina. At a talk I went to earlier this year, one of the scientists from the project, called FACE (Free-Air Carbon dioxide Enrichment), said the growth rate for poison ivy has increased by 71 percent since they began pumping CO2 onto the forest plots.

Photo credit: FACE