A recent interview from NPR affiliate WAMC Northeast Public Radio’s “Northeast Notebook” titled “Apple growers confront climate change, fuel challenges for 2026 harvest,” blames low apple production in New York on “increasingly unpredictable” weather. This story is promoting a factually inaccurate narrative. If climate change was harming New York apple production, there would be evidence of this in apple production and yields over the long term, but this is not the case.
WAMC published a transcript of an interview style report conducted with Hudson Valley apple growers, who WAMC says “encountered a late April frost, skyrocketing diesel prices, and a federal crackdown on foreign labor in 2026,” which have created “uncertain economic conditions.”
Sam Dingman, reporter for the WAMC’s Northeast Notebook, claimed that apple farmers need to guard themselves “against unexpected losses from increasingly unpredictable spring weather,” ultimately blaming climate change for allegedly worsening growing conditions for apple farmers in New York.
Although it is true that a late spring frost can damage yields for a season, this is normal weather variability, not climate change. Also, the good news is that late spring frosts are becoming less frequent. One need only look at the April minimum temperature data in New York to see that cold snaps are not becoming more extreme or unpredictable during apple bloom season. In fact, previous decades saw larger variation between April lows than recent years. (See figure below)
Farmers have have had to deal with bad weather every season, some worse than others, throughout history. The fact that spring blooming seasons are slightly longer today than they were a hundred-plus years ago, does not indicate trouble for crops, rather the opposite.
Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that apple production and yields in New York have risen 35 percent from just 1980 to 2025, with 2025 having seen an all-time record for production. (See figure below)
If long term climate change was damaging apple production, one would expect long-term damage to be indicated by the data, but it is not.
Previous Climate Realism articles have covered similar claims about apple production from the U.S. at large, and even Kashmir, and in both of those cases the data showed the same thing: apple production and yields have increased across the United States and the world amid the modest climate change of the past century. That is despite the fact that in the United States at least, the acreage devoted to growing apples has declined in the past few decades.
Of course apple growers in New York and elsewhere may be experiencing difficulties, like higher costs due to skyrocketing diesel prices and a federal crackdown on foreign labor, and that might have made a compelling story, but those factors have nothing to do with the story’s lede, “Climate Change.”
NPR’s affiliate station in New York is promoting a lot of nonsense in this story, in line with standard climate alarmist propaganda. One bad season for apples on certain farms can’t be blamed on climate change, that’s the truth the data shows and nothing but.
Whenever I read a story like this about the biased NPR coverage of the climate issue, I keep thinking about their FCC broadcast license. What a shame it would be if something strange and mysterious happened to their broadcast license at renewal time and it didn’t get renewed.
But, as they say, you-know-what (s***) happens.
If the problem is being reported on by NPR, PBS, the CBC, BBC, The Guardian, and all the consistently alarmist outlets, we have to be suspicious about it from the outset. These outfits are famous for seizing on the smallest weather incident and trying to turn it into a major global catastrophe. Ironically my neighbor recently gave me a 10lb. bag of excellent small apples from her backyard tree, and they were the best it has produced for years now, and we don’t even live in an area where apple production is consistently good, so maybe or most likely New York just had a bad season for the fruit. Except the doomsday crowd as usual is trying to make a big deal out of nothing.
It has been proven by repeated identical dialogue and print from the suggested news outlets and more that they report and answer to a common source ….. Marxist or whatever you want to call it.
Climate change causes “federal crackdown on foreign labor,” doesn’t it?
I seem to recall, but cannot recollect the actual name, an organization prepares these alarmist hit pieces and sends them out to news media to publish.
So much for objective journalism.
Are late frosts so unpredictable that putting irrigation systems or torches in place to protect the trees becomes impossible? It’s a genuine question, not irony.
In France, the grape harvest has been magnificent. The grapes are gorgeous. I don’t drink alcohol, but I love grapes. And apparently, they’re starting to make good alcohol-free wine!
Frost-fans are the go-to solution in orchards. Engines using propane drive fans that draw warmer air from above to protect blossoms. A difficult problem is wet and windy weather hindering pollination. This last reduced my plum crop this year. The weather improved during the time my two apple trees blossomed. 🙂
Barely awake with blurry eyes, when I saw “Frost-fans” I thought you were going to discuss “onlyfans”. 🙂
alcohol-free wine? But what would Dionysus and Bacchus think about that? 🙂
They would laugh until they were tipsy. 😉
Probably nothing good! But it’s a nice compromise for people like me who can’t drink alcohol for medical reasons (I’m on a very long-term medication, and it doesn’t mix well with alcohol).
I don’t drink alcohol because it makes me feel stupid. I occasionally enjoy cannabis because it makes me think I’m brilliant. 🙂 🙂
Alcohol free wine? Isn’t that grape juice?
No, it’s produced by fermenting grape juice and taking out the alcohol during the process.
A good non alc wine is a nice quaffing drink. You aren’t going to get the robustness and subtleties of flavour of a long aged red or white, but you will get something that is enjoyable to drink on a hot day that doesn’t have the sugar content of grape juice.
Counters need to shift from counting acreage and go to counting trees. Searchup in images: “high-density apple growing”
Compare these images to the one at the top with the trees spaced yards apart.
The 2026 trees in the Washington State apple region are loaded although harvest hasn’t begun. Packers are sorting and shipping last year’s crop.
National Propaganda Radio will never govern me.
Hopefully it’ll fail soon, thanks to getting off welfare.
The idea that “climate change” is causing “unpredictable weather” is frankly, retarded.
This rhetorical trick indicates that weather once used to be predictable for us.
This claim comes with certain problems.
We have all the models that officially work great.
We now have all these supercomputers.
How comes the weather has become more unpredictable – and why do the experts still have their jobs if they can not predict.
And how comes that food production is increasing everywhere(except for NY apples and deliberate fertilizer shortages) alongside unpredictable weather?
And how much unpredictability can 0.01% co2 even make?
How does it exactly disturb a system of trillions of watts of energy and trillions of tons of atmospheric gas,earth and water?
And how comes that a system can ever be stable if it can be crushed by a lousy 0.01% change?
The whole language abused is to confirm to the masses that “average” is the norm and anything not the norm is abnormal and to be feared.
None of the multiple terrestrial climates (micro climate in an earlier time) are in equilibrium. So “stable” has to allow for natural variations.
My experience with real apple trees over 15 years is that they don’t listen to climate fear porn. They come out of dormancy each spring with remarkable reliability, they flower with remarkable consistency, particularly if they are pruned properly. And they produce fruit with remarkable reliability.
For no more than 3hrs work per tree per year outside of harvest (and some of that is optional biodynamic spraying), you get loads of tasty healthy fruit.
My one apple tree just had the best year of the 20 years I’ve lived in north central Wokeachusetts.
I wish I could say the same thing. None of my 3 Apple trees bore any fruit and although my cherry blossomed only a few days later than normal there were no cherries (which the birds get most of anyway). I have lived here for 60 years and do not recall this ever happening. I live in Westchester county about 25 miles north of the George Washington bridge and my temperature is routinely 10 degrees below NYC.
My limited understanding is that late frosts do the most damage. Didn’t have that this year. It was slightly warmer than average, slightly less rain- so lots of sun and no pests. Maybe in the Hudson Valley you got a late frost? Often cold air will channel down low lying valleys- but that’s a wild guess. My blueberries and raspberries also did very well. I’m at about 600′ elevation in north central Wokeachusetts. The soil is rather infertile, on granite bedrock, with mostly very sandy loam soil on a glacial outwash plain.
Of course your apple tree did well in Wokeachusetts.
The local politicians supply an almost limitless amount of free fertilizer.
I am baffled how a court can rule that greenhouse gases are pollutants when
These have been part of our atmosphere since the first life appearedSeeing CO2 is produced naturally and without it life would not exist and no applesSeeing water vapour is the most abundant greenhouse gas and certainly no pollutantSeeing no court (or expert) can quantify exactly how much CO2 would tip the balance from being a beneficial gas to harmful levelsIf neither the courts nor experts can clearly refute these they have no basis to rule.
Someone needs to tell these people that late frosts are a sign of cooling, not warming. I suppose climate change can be construed to be either cooling or warming, but blaming anthropogenic warming for late frosts makes no sense at all.
This is what many studies have turned into. Blame climate change for something with no proof that temperatures are the cause of what is occurring. Just accept that temperatures are warming and must be causing the change. Pseudoscience at its best.
Wait just a doggone minute!
A late spring frost is due to global warming?
Some kind of mystical heat inversion must be a play.
Very nice Linnea. We all know that farmers and ranchers are at the mercy of weather, they always have been and always will. Too bad we can’t come up with something bad journalists and academics are at the mercy of. Oh wait we already have it, it’s called individual accountability, too bad we don’t hold them accountable.
If the models say crops are suffering, then they are.
Only a complete science denier would put something as trivial as data ahead of a model projection. /sarc