The science blog Climateer was started on Feb. 2, 2007 the day the IPCC WG I Summary was released. That same day I linked to the blog of Lubos Motl (asst. Prof. Physics, Harvard).
Through a tortuous series of links I find that Prof. Motl wrote that day:
"Also, the report has changed some standards how to evaluate the confidence in science. Instead of 95% or 99% confidence intervals, they use 90% confidence. The probability that "A" (anthropogenic) belongs to "GW" (global warming) is 90%, the report effectively says: the verbal form of "more than 90%" is "very likely", according to a footnote.
In all other branches of science, such a "high" confidence level would be viewed as a hint to start to consider a speculative hypothesis as a remote possibility: even the recent Higgs signal has a higher confidence.
In climate science, 90% (calculated by not exceedingly transparent methods) is apparently enough to close the debate. ;-)Just to remind you, 90% is the probability that a randomly chosen digit such as 7 is not equal to 7. :-)."
I obviously read his post and this morning, thinking such profound insight could spring fully formed only from my own highly evolved consciousness, started babbling on rather than giving one simple link. Sorry.
