I would judge the chances that evolution is incorrect by lower than 10^{-6}.
When the IPCC uses 10^{-2} as the category for global warming that off by many orders of magnitude.
A person who would believe that the chances of human-caused global warming are 10% would be nearer at the truth than a person who think that it's in the same category as evolution.
and I have the strong impression that they are being deliberately overcautious
Basically given the information to which you have been exposed you have a strong impression that the IPCC is making a mistake in the direction that would align with your politics.
The outside view suggests that most of the time experts are a bit overconfident. The replication crisis suggests that scientists are often overconfident. With climate science we are speaking about a domain that doesn't even have access to running real controlled experiments to verify important beliefs. That makes me doubt the idea that IPCC are underconfident.
If those IPCC scientists are that good at not being overconfident, why don't we tell the psychologists to listen to them to deal with their replication crisis?
I would judge the chances [...]
There are some contexts in which the difference between 99.999% and 99.9% is about the same as the difference between 10% and 90%. However, I do not think this is one of them. I repeat: the letter you are talking about did not say anything about probabilities; it said "some scientific theories have a shedload of evidence and are well enough established that we can reasonably call them facts; here are some familiar examples; well, global warming is also in that category".
I think it's probably 100x more certain tha...
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