The Thousand Year Rainfall Fallacy

Every time we get a big rain in the US, climate morons start claiming it was a 1,000 year event

So what are they doing wrong?

Your odds of winning the lottery are very small, but the odds of someone winning the lottery are quite high. What these geniuses are doing is conflating the odds of one individual station getting a 20 inch rain, with the odds of any station getting a 20 inch rain.

Big rains are not rare in the US. Alvin, Texas got 43 inches of rain in one day in 1979.

We heard exactly the same 1,000 year nonsense after the 20 inch rains of 2013 in Colorado, but Colorado got 24 inches of rain in six hours in 1935.

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There are records of many other comparable rains in the US, but people make the same mistake generation after generation.

ScreenHunter_1858 Jan. 15 22.36

10 Jan 1871 – IMAGINARY CHANGES OF CLIMATE. (Pall Mall Gazette.)

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11 Responses to The Thousand Year Rainfall Fallacy

  1. Jeff says:

    My question would be what was the CO2 level a thousand years ago? Tony is right on calling all these folks climate criminals!!!

  2. Gary H says:

    Hell and High Water: The Flood of 1916 was well underway . .

    But even as the rain was tapering, another hurricane was brewing, and no one knew that it, too, was making its way west. This cyclone was forming in the mid-Atlantic, and it would make landfall in Charleston, South Carolina, on Friday night, July 14.

    ” On Saturday, July 15, 1916, the Blue Ridge region saw more rain than anyone anywhere had ever seen since such records had been kept. One spot in Altapass, near Grandfather Mountain, measured more than 22 inches of rain in 24 hours.”

    http://www.ourstate.com/flood-of-1916/

    Also posted at notalotofpeopleknowthat

  3. GeologyJim says:

    You never cease to amaze, Mr Heller, with these perfect tidbits from the historical press.

    1871 – what a hoot!

    I also love the clipping you’ve posted several times calling out the “crime” of false reporting of weather data

    Keep it up, Tony!

  4. Tel says:

    If you think statistics is hard… then see how hard it is teaching statistics.

  5. Terry Jay says:

    Or the California Eel River flood of 1967. It hit the Eel river, Mad River and Trinity River areas in Humboldt County and adjoining areas just before Christmas and took months to reopen all the roads. The Eel River was reported at 1 million cfs.

  6. David Blake says:

    Gee. There seems to have been a lot of thousand year events since 1900:
    http://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/tropical/rain/1956NHRPreportNo3.pdf

    {Large .pdf}

  7. Denis Ables says:

    Assume one bad weather event occurs once every 1000 years in each state. If these were evenly spaced out, one of the states would be reporting such an event every 20 years. Obviously, these are not spaced out evenly so that event would occur in several states in the same year, or in no states for a few years.

    But there’s more than one kind of event. Alarmists are now claiming almost anything to be a rare event (even heavy snowfall and low temperatures), so we’ll likely be experiencing one or more such events almost every year because the alarmists also count nearly anything that hasn’t happened in a couple of months as a “1 in 1000 year” event.

  8. Denis Ables says:

    Assume one bad weather event occurs once every 1000 years in each state. If these were evenly spaced out, one of the states would be reporting such an event every 20 years. Obviously, these are not spaced out evenly so that event would occur in several states in the same year, or in no states for a few years.

    But there’s more than one kind of event. Alarmists are now claiming almost anything to be a rare event (even heavy snowfall and low temperatures), so we’ll likely be experiencing one or more such events almost every year because the alarmists also count nearly anything that hasn’t happened in a couple of months as a “1 in 1000 year” event.

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