IT HAS been brought to my attention that for no apparent reason, in a letter of April 23, Dr Martin Rodger criticised me for having “attacked” the Royal Society and NASA in 2009 and for having “a history of climate-change denying”.

I don’t know anyone who denies that the climate changes; history and geology have shown us that the climate has always changed.

As a physicist with many years experience in the fields of fluid flow, heat transfer and thermal-hydraulics, I have a deep understanding of the physical processes which drive the climate.

Indeed, it would be inconceivable to me that a chaotic, non-linear, multi-variate, open system such as the earth’s atmosphere, could be stable and would not change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) has stated in one of its many scientific papers that it is impossible to calculate the future state of the climate because of this chaotic nature of the climate system.

In its political papers the IPCC does not admit this, but the fact that none of over 100 climate models in use was able to predict the fact that there has been no global warming for over 18 years is testament to the impossibility of predicting the future climate.

It shows that our knowledge of how the climate system works is seriously incomplete.

I suspect that Dr Rodger is no scientist otherwise he would not just accept statements from a few individuals at the Royal Society and NASA.

It is no accident that the motto of the Royal Society translates as “take nobody’s word for it”.

Scientists do not accept arguments from authority but are only interested in scientific evidence.

Dr Rodger appears to prefer to criticise scientists rather than examine scientific evidence.

Dr Phillip Bratby, Devon