The odds of winning the lottery are millions to one, yet people win all the time. Climate scientists would describe this as a “million year event.”
The fallacy is pretty obvious. The odds of any one person winning the lottery are small, but the odds of someone out of millions of people winning, are quite good.
Climate scientists often say that a very heavy point rainfall is a 1,000 year event, even though very heavy rainfalls occur quite often. The odds of any one location receiving a very heavy rain during the course of a year may be small, but the odds of some location receiving a very heavy rain are pretty high. Scientists then run to that location, call it a thousand year rainfall, and blame you.
