Science Quote by Piers Corbyn

Corbyn’s line is designed to sound like a sober lab verdict, but it functions more like a rhetorical stop sign planted in front of an entire field. “Has reached its limits” is absolute language: it doesn’t just critique current models, it implies a hard ceiling on future improvement. That framing matters because it shifts debate from “What are today’s uncertainties?” to “Why bother refining this at all?” In public discourse, that move is powerful precisely because it flatters the listener’s suspicion that experts are overpromising.

The subtext is positional. By declaring mainstream computer modelling tapped out, Corbyn elevates alternative methods (including his own forecasting approach) without having to argue them in detail. It’s a classic credibility judo: treat the dominant tool as exhausted, and your outsider thesis becomes the “open-minded” option by default.

Context does the rest of the work. Weather models are visibly imperfect to everyday people; everyone has experienced a busted forecast. Corbyn leverages that lived annoyance and quietly smuggles it into the climate conversation, where the time scales, metrics, and evaluation standards are different. The line collapses those distinctions: if tomorrow’s rain can be wrong, then decades-ahead projections must be fantasy. That’s not a scientific argument so much as an emotional shortcut.

As a sound bite, it’s efficient: it borrows the authority of scientific caution while pushing a political conclusion. Its real intent is less about describing modelling than about licensing doubt.