If the scientist says climate change will be a big problem with probability between 95% and 98%, what most people hear is that "We don't know if it will be a problem, so we might as well not do anything about it." It is as if it doesn't really matter if you say the chance is 0.01 to 0.99 or 0.99 to 0.999. It is all just probabilities and it comes out as not actionable.
In a binary mind, a 70% likelyhood of an outcome (more than 50%) means that if the opposite happens, everything that went into the prediction was wrong.
But all of these sources made more detailed predictions than a simple binary winner. For example, the probability that Hillary received <=232 electoral votes (as was her pledged total) was ~4.3% according to the New York Times.
Do you have any articles where the statisticians analyze what happened?
Consider a very simple model, where each person in the country has a probability `p_i` of the chance that they vote for party A, and `1-p_i` that they vote for party B.
Now if we have access to the values `p_i` of all `n` people in the population, then probability that party A wins can be calculated as
P = sum_{a \in {0,1}^n with |a| > n/2} product_{i = 1 to n} {p_i if a_i = 0 else 1-p_i}
Here we have assumed an underlying random model, which has a probability, and we can estimate that probability within error bounds. We could try to calculate
P* = sum_{way of sampling k people} (probability of sampling this way) * (probability A wins in this case)
I don't think the climate change "argument" the American society is currently having is about whether the probability of its existence is 0 or 1; it's about whether it's 0 or not 0.
Of course what the "not 1" crowd tend to miss is that you don't need 100% certainty about something before you take action on it. If you're in a plane with a 50% chance of fire on board then the procedures are pretty much the same as a plane with a 100% chance of fire on board.
Usually I see (and throw out myself) these terms when someone bandies around any of the common denialist talking points like "we used to be concerned about global cooling" or "it hasn't cooled since '98". Unfortunately the "ladder of knowledge" is more of a mouse wheel and the same people will end up using the same arguments, even when they're shown to be wrong.
I'm a scientist. I don't believe in facts. I believe in models, explanations, measurements with appropriate error bars, provisional theories and educated guesses, but never facts. When somebody comes to me claiming that they know "the facts" I put up my defences.
Perhaps what people really need is not a better appreciation of facts but a more realistic appreciation of uncertainties. Perhaps if we could all stop arguing about whether the probability of disastrous climate change is 0 or 1, and instead accept that it's somewhere between 0.01 and 0.99, then we could make some progress on the issue.