John Davis, in his letter to the June 2015 issue of Weather (The 30-year ‘baseline’ and the reality of climate change; Davis, 2015), describes those influential public figures who dismiss the concept (the reality of anthropogenic climate change) as imaginary and/or irrelevant as possibly scientifically illiterate. However, this possibility hardly applies to the many scientists, including the world-famous mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson, professors of atmospheric science and this writer, who are indeed sceptics. Our scepticism is not of climate change, which occurred long before mankind, nor of man's influence on climate, well documented by the disciplines of urban, forest and agricultural meteorology, but rather of the certainty claimed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for their assessments of anthropogenic climate change and its negative consequences for humanity.