An interesting leap of logic

The Monday New York Times had an interesting article--linked--noting that the IPCC's confidence in the hypothesis of man-made global warming is higher than ever.  Upon looking at the article, however, no clarification is made about how the IPCC calculated this likelihood.

There are of course two ways that such a likelihood could be calculated.  The first, honest way is to have a model with demonstrated reliability in predicting climate patterns, and to do a sensitivity analysis while analyzing the residuals. 

However, I am sure that the Times would have trumpeted models that indeed had a proven track record of matching historical data--no such model has been trumpeted to my knowledge.  So we ought to conclude that the honest method of calculating this likelihood is excluded.

That leaves the usual IPCC method; appeal to authority leading to what clearly appears to be a politically and professionally motivated guess.  In other words, exactly the kind of "rectal data extraction" that the skeptical have been complaining about for decades.