This is why having the basic context of the field is important. Taking even an introductory undergraduate astrophysics course would make it obvious that the scales involved are massively different.

The Bullet Cluster result (and other cluster collisions that have been observed since then, as I linked) looks much more like exotic dark matter then MACHOs. It's exactly what we would expect to see from exotic dark matter. Sean was writing a blog post on the topic, not a book. It's not his responsibility to detail the entirety of decades of work. If you want to see more in-depth explanations, go do some research.



He explicitly does not make such a statement, because he doesn't say it's all that's left, period; he says it's all that's left for the big discoveries of the past century, the known data, and makes no prediction that no further big discoveries will occur. The point is that we don't have current major results in astrophysics that we have no good idea about how to explain. "Settled" means low uncertainty, not no uncertainty.



I'm still not clear on the distinction you're making between "preponderance of the evidence" and "beyond reasonable doubt."

"Climategate" happened due to politics, not science; it was a manufactured scandal. See the link for a thorough debunking of it.