Thank you for pointing out the reason why science works the way it does ... and how poor the popular press is about communicating this to the public.
Lets take just one paragraph of what you copied and examine it:
"The small print explains ?very likely? as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain?s top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion."
Note how in this paragraph they are attempting to juxtapose the considered judgment of essentially every climatologist and researcher on the planet saying it is "very like" that something is true with a single incident involving the poor judgment of a single individual?
Too bad ... because you should have.
Individual scientists are human, make errors, and are thus required to submit to peer review as a way of (we hope) catching those errors quickly. Sometimes we don't. But the point is that we don't accept the word of a Newton or Einstein without pointing out their errors. And thus it is with a single or a small group of scientists in any discipline whether climatology or gerontology or with your example, above, of Sir Cockcroft.
If it doesn't meet this test:
http://teacher.pas.rochester.edu/phy_labs/AppendixE/AppendixE.htmlIt isn't science.
Which is precisely the problem with the agenda you seem to be sneaking up on promoting.
BTW: Knock off the shouting. We are not impressed by colors, bold face, italics, exclamation marks, etc. Keep it up and we know precisely how to mark your posts *** Ignore ***.
