This is my response to the article by Kimberly Izar, “’Water, Water Everywhere’: How Extreme Weather is Changing New York’s Farming Industry” that was published in your paper. This article was reprinted from Radio Catskill.

Unhappily, none of the claims about the rising Earth temperatures, more frequent “extreme weather” and the increasing rainfall in Sullivan County, NY are true. 

I am not interested in political proclivities and political bias of the author. Neither do I write from those positions myself.

But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data for Sullivan County, NY, available on the NOAA website [see links below] shows no increase in temperatures or in rainfall in Sullivan County since the year 1895. The rising trend would have to demonstrate itself by higher highs and higher lows but there is nothing like that whatsoever:

www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/county/time-series/NY-105/tavg/1/0/1895-2025.

I will conclude by saying that scientists use scientific data. Charlatans (this is not a curse, as the definition of a charlatan is “somebody who claims to have knowledge he or she does not possess”) and politically biased journalists jump on the scientifically unverified hypothesis of “climate change” without any scientific evidence. 

As a Ph.D wrote to me: “It is just common sense!” So much for that.

It would be best to disassociate ourselves from such an approach to science in the interest of truth and accuracy. 

 Unhappily, such scientifically unverified articles appear frequently these days. I will only point out that we have been through similar nonsense in the 1960s and the 1970s, when the faulty claim of “global cooling” was defended with the same zeal by similarly scientifically deficient defenders.

As a side issue, it is well known that by grouping collected data for 130 years, as shown above, in a certain way and by selecting data in a certain way, it may be possible to confirm several rising trends. It is just that such intermediate trends, up or down, do not confirm any trend over 130 years.

It should be noted that the temperatures inside big cities, such as in Central Park in New York City, may show an increasing trend over the last 130 years. There is a simple explanation for that: The number of cars that emit hot gases through their exhaust has increased dramatically during the last 130 years. Similarly, the number of air conditioning units emitting hot air onto the street has increased substantially since the year 1902.

Finally, for years the proponents of “climate change” used to cite as a support for their beliefs that “hotter air holds more water and this causes heavier rain and therefore ‘extreme weather.’”

The relationship among the air temperature, the relative humidity of air and the amount of moisture in the air is as described below. It turns out that the claim in the article above is also false. The facts are as follows:

1. Warmer air indeed holds more water.
2. But the relative humidity of air goes down with higher air temperature.
3. As rain happens only when the relative humidity reaches 100 percent, even if the air temperature would go up, for the same amount of moisture in the air, the relative humidity of the air would drop. It would therefore rain less frequently, and not more frequently, as falsely claimed in the article.

Ivan Orisek, M.Sc (Eng.) lives in Forestburgh, NY.