Comment 8 by Jos Gibbons

This article may be over a year old, and I may have detected this phenomenon long before it was written, and I may be far from alone in that respect, but its message isn’t outdated. It won’t be until this double standard is only a memory. It is a very dangerous double standard. It makes it impossible for atheists to have any kind of voice at all without literally anything they say in their capacity as atheists being treated as not only highly controversial, but the sort of thing it is only wished were even rarer.

It comes from "middlist, fudgist, ignoramouses posing as being "moderate", by taking the middle ground between what THEY PERCEIVE as two extremes, and the simplistic reversal of the ignorant who can only see two views - their own and THE wrong one.

Its a bit like AGW climate denial. Deniers " know " nothing is wrong with the Earth's climate because of human activities, and the scientists are "wrong"!

The scientists know there are huge numbers of variable, models and possible local and global outcomes with differing details. It would be possible to report comparable outcomes under different scenarios, but that would involve study and understanding not of just one set of inputs and one model, but numerous different ones.
Too much like hard work for brain-lazy journalists, politicians, or spoon-fed sheeples. It is much easier to take up a patronising pose, and claim scientists can't agree among themselves.