DEAR SIR: I am writing to you in the hope that you are genuinely interested in climate science and the facts. I read your article in the Irish Farmer’s Journal with great interest and, as you say yourself, “we have a duty to at least listen and try and assess the arguments”.

You say: “MIT is one of the leading scientific institutes in the world and if scientists who have reached that stage of achievement in their career are making serious points, then in my view we have a duty to at least listen and try and assess the arguments.”

This is absolutely true, and I’d suggest having a look through the hundreds of academic articles MIT scientists have written on the subject. You’ll find that most if not all of them will acknowledge the fact that the planet is warming and greenhouse gases are responsible.

Furthermore, you say: “The key point for me was the statement that methane produced by cattle and sheep and nitrous oxide produced in tillage operations have very little role in whatever global warming is taking place. The point was made that naturally occurring water vapour in the atmosphere is thousands of times more plentiful than these gases and its greenhouse effect vastly outweighs any additional effect they could have.”

Naturally occurring water vapour in the atmosphere certainly is much more plentiful than other greenhouse gases, which all act together to keep the earth at a habitable temperature.

It is worth noting that these greenhouse gases make up a tiny proportion of the gas mix-up of our atmosphere, but without them, the planet would be an ice-ball with a surface temperature of -18°C.

The tiny concentration of these greenhouse gases clearly has a huge effect on surface temperatures, they make this planet liveable, and the increasing concentration of these gases is warming the world at an unprecedented rate.

The important point is that water vapour concentration is not increasing, greenhouse gas emissions are. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 – this is a fact and is not up for debate. The global surface temperature is going up and the only thing which explains it is the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases.