From Giuseppe Sollazzo
Ken Pettett writes to complain about the uncertain language used by climate scientists (19 July, p 32). Specifically, he compares this way of speaking to the strong language of business leaders and politicians, whose careers he says have never been ruined by a long-term prediction failing.
Science doesn’t work this way. Science is about assigning probabilities to outcomes through experimentation. Sometimes those probabilities will get very close to 1, but a scientist should rarely talk in terms of certainties.
London, UK
