The universe is spinning out of control!
The odds of any lottery ticket winning are millions to one, yet in recent years we have had dozens of lottery winners per year.
We know that the world is out of control, because million to one events are happening almost every week now!
Well, as they say, someone is going to win. That’s why I buy a ticket every 5 years whether I need to or not. Fewer people believe they will be struck by lightening, yet the odds are 1:280,000 (or up to 700,000 depending on the source of the estimate) than believe they won’t win a lottery drawing. McKibben must be in that large portion of the population that didn’t understand the 2 pages of probability he had in high school math.
Roughly 200 homes are struck by lightning each year in the US. My home was struck last year, so it’s worse than we thought. 😉
Climate change lightning is targeting you denier types!!
My brother’s house has been struck 3 times since he has been living there. The last strike due to a lucky camera shot made the local paper. I haven’t tried to calculate the odds.
OT A must read Steve.
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2013/09/16/undocumented-la-county-parents-projected-to-receive-650m-in-welfare-benefits/
The odds of someone on earth being shot in Chicago next weekend must be billions to 1. Of course if you are in Chicago, the odds are greatly reduced and in certain neighborhoods even more reduced. Gotta love odds.
I’ve been in and around the oil and gas business, the computer industry, the food business and water ventures for 35 years now, and I’ve seen ‘the deal of a lifetime’ come across my desk at the rate of about once a month now. My dad saw one or two in his career. Increasing frequency, or was he just too damned busy taking care of business day-to-day to notice. He just turned a very healthy 90 last month. Is it just luck that he’s still here, or could it be he lived through a true depression, ww2/Korea, then a career at gulf oil corp. where he was responsible for drilling over 4,500 wells in his career? He wouldn’t be impressed by mckibben.
Lies, damned lies and statistics.
“We know that the world is out of control, because million to one events are happening almost every week now!”
yeah, in his head. Probably he also hears voices…. My advice would be a straight jacket and a permanent room in a secure asylum, steel door, steel bars in front of the window, climate control simulating temperatures on the arctic and at least 1800 ppm Co2 for starters.
Five years minimum.
It’s at least a hundred million to one that McKibben will think logically. I would like to be there for the second it happens.
Excellent analogy.
This is a really good analogy to demonstrate the scam. How can we make it go viral?