From Watts Up With That?

By Joe Duarte

Climate activism has a long history of innumeracy and gaps in baseline scientific knowledge (ask an activist how much warming is projected from now to 2100 in a moderate IPCC scenario – the flagship warming phenomenon). Some years ago, I came upon something so stupid that it paralyzed me. It locked my brain when I tried to write about it, and I let it sit for years like a Horcrux I dare not touch. Just knowing that it was out there bothered me.

It’s the opening paragraph of a 2012 Rolling Stone article by Bill McKibben – “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math”. It’s a remarkable artifact that I’ve come to use as a test of applied intelligence and reading ability. Only one person has ever passed, and every climate scientist I’ve tried has failed, including Gavin Schmidt and Katharine Hayhoe:

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

The final, bolded clause is the test. Focus on his claim – the 327th consecutive month that the temperature of the globe exceeded the 20th-century average, on which he performs some sort of probability calculation. (From now on, I’ll abbreviate the 20th-century average as the 20C average, not to be confused with the actual value, which was 13.9 °C.)

Pause here and ponder his sentence. Do you understand what he’s saying? What does he mean by his “odds” claim? Is his statement valid? Is it true? What do you need to know to evaluate it?

Take your time, come back tomorrow, or keep reading as you wish.

You might’ve noticed his error in calling 3.7 × 10⁻⁹⁹ a large number (and implicitly an integer). It’s an infinitesimal number, a fractional decimal that starts with 0.00000… That’s not the core problem, so set that aside. (Note that Rolling Stone hasn’t corrected this obvious error in 13 years.)

Focus on his core claim — the 327th consecutive month that the temperature of the globe exceeded the 20C average, on which he performs some sort of probability calculation.

Let’s clarify that his span of months covers 27¼ years, running from March, 1985 through May, 2012.

He’s saying that this span was warmer than the 20C average. Clear?

That’s odd, since of course it was. That’s what warming means. If the earth warmed throughout the 20th century, then of course the late 20th and early 21st centuries will be warmer than the 20C average, unless it cooled significantly during that period.

What about his odds statement? Well, not all strings of words are meaningful, and his is not. Before we proceed, let’s ground ourselves with this graph of global temperatures from 1901-2012.

McKibben is essentially looking at this warming trend and saying “Wow, the monthly temperatures starting in 1985 are always above the 20C average, and isn’t that incredibly fishy?” His span starts at 0.22 °C above that average (March, 1985) per the NOAA global land and ocean data.

This is about as stupid as humans get.

McKibben doesn’t provide any sources or identify the dataset he used, but they’re all similar enough for our purposes. It wasn’t the NOAA data, or his span would’ve started in 1979, adding 72 months.

NOTE: All temperatures here are Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST), a complex statistic that draws from thousands of stations and involves various corrections and weights. I’m not confident in its validity or utility as a construct, but let’s grant it for present purposes.

First, let’s note that the earth is a planet, not a sidewalk, and as such it rarely cools by more than 0.22 °C in a month. As you can see, by the late 1990s, temperatures would have to drop by at least 0.4 °C to dip below the 20C average. The graph is annual, not monthly, but it gives us the gist, and no month from 1901 to 2012 cooled by 0.4 °C or more. The average monthly change from 1901 – 2012 was 0.00071 °C of warming.

Back to his odds statement. What is this 3.7 x 10⁻⁹⁹ number? It’s a probability – which he incorrectly calls odds – and he says it’s the probability of every month in that span remaining above the 20C average “by simple chance”. That statement has no meaning, but let’s pause to figure out how he computed this.

For some reason he thinks monthly averages are important and he performed some sort of calculation regarding this string of 327 months. What calculation? It must be this:

So what was his x? Well, we need to solve an exponential equation, child’s play for the American man. We can take the log of both sides and work the steps or just invert and switch the exponent. Therefore:

Which equals 0.5.

When I discovered this a few years ago, I wanted to go on walkabout. We won’t have a civilization for long if this savagery is normalized. McKibben treated a planetary climate system as a monthly coin flip, such that global temperatures had even odds of landing on either side of his arbitrary baseline, even though the planet was well above that baseline at the start. If in one month the earth was, say, 0.4 °C above the 20C average, he’s saying there are even odds that the next month it would either:

1. Cool by more than 0.4 °C.
2. Cool by less than 0.4 °C, warm by any amount, or stay the same.

In reality, Option 2 was certain — the earth has never cooled ≥ 0.4 °C in any month from 1901 – 2012.

He took 0.5, treated it as an independent probability, and multiplied it by itself over and over — 326 times — thinking that he was computing the “odds” of every month in that 1985-2012 span remaining above the 20C average by “simple chance”.

That formulation has no meaning. There’s no such thing as “the odds of every month from 1985 to 2012 remaining above the 20C average by simple chance”. The earth is a planet — its surface temperature and energy balance are physical, empirical realities, it doesn’t randomly reset every month, and his span starts at a temperature that is already well above his arbitrary 20C baseline. The earth won’t shed such massive amounts of energy in a month.

It’s like asking for the odds that the earth remains a planet from 1985 to 2012, as opposed to turning into a dog or something, “by simple chance”. This string of words has no meaning. You could compute some probabilities of a monthly average – or a string of them – being above or below a baseline, but if you use a baseline well below normal fluctuation, and during a warming trend, you know the answer without needing to compute anything. In any case, there is no “simple chance” – it’s an empirical question that would be powered by empirical data and modeling. You can’t do anything with a calculator and a fixed, independent probability like 0.5 or any other value.

By “simple chance”, McKibben might means “if not for global warming”. But the earth did warm, he started with the earth 0.22 °C above his baseline, and again the earth is a planet, not a coin. He thinks his probability calculation is new information, that it adds to the evidence for warming and cause for alarm.

McKibben found a way to take the observed warming — the recent past that we already knew about — and turn it into a “terrifying” new development. He made the past terrifying.

That is truly remarkable and highlights the profound neuroticism, emotion dysregulation, and innumeracy that drives so much leftist climate panic. This is not a scientifically serious movement or belief system. A major media outlet published this – what might be the most savagely stupid misinformation we’ll ever see, and in thirteen years has not noticed or corrected it. It’s not just a failure of baseline intelligence, but of cognitive activation. The people at Rolling Stone are not able to read his opening paragraph and understand what he did. In fact, I’m not sure they could follow this explainer.

Similarly, partisan media outlets are not able to read fraudulent or invalid climate science consensus papers and notice that they’re fraudulent or invalid. We have a broad and deep problem with getting people to read attentively across topics, especially when they’re politicized. We’re just not getting adequate {baseline IQ + attention} focused on media articles and claims. So much nonsense is flowing into our brains — collectively, we’re not operating at a sufficient level of consciousness. It shouldn’t be possible for McKibben to have published his claim, nor for it to remain uncorrected for 13 years.

Testing the Experts

I mentioned that I use McKibben’s paragraph as a test.

In 2022, I asked two climate scientist-activists a basic question: Starting now, what’s the probability of any given month’s GMST being higher than the 20^th century average?

Gavin Schmidt got the answer right straight away – 100%. He stumbled in understanding what McKibben did, saying that it was “the likelihood of the observed trend assuming no external forcing”, but no trend is needed for monthlies to not drop below the 20C average when you start 0.22 °C above it. I don’t think Schmidt realized that the period started in 1985. More fundamentally, taking an imagined probability to the 327^th power does not yield the likelihood of anything, much less the likelihood of the observed trend assuming no external forcing.

I also asked Katharine Hayhoe. I never got her to understand the question. It’s an unusual question, but trivially easy if you just take a second to think about it. It takes a certain versatility and rigor to be able to reason about novel questions and step outside the scripted cognition that can dominate our daily lives.

Worse, Hayhoe didn’t seem to know the 20C average offhand or where we were relative to it. It was awkward for me to know more about basic climate science facts than a purported climate scientist – I’m a social psychologist. The red flags on Hayhoe’s website proved prescient – she very awkwardly brags about honors she’s received, including “World’s Greatest Leaders”, “100 Most Influential People”, and even wrote “In 2019 I was honoured to be named to Foreign Policy’s list of 100 Global Thinkers for the second time” (emphasis hers).

I would be so embarrassed to disclose that anyone had named me one of the “100 Most Influential People” or a “World’s Greatest Leader” – I can’t imagine putting it on my own website. I knew Hayhoe was a political partisan committed to stoking fear and hatred over mild climate change, but I hoped she would at least understand the barbarism of what McKibben did. I wanted leftists like her and Schmidt to be the voices of reason and get Rolling Stone to correct, but I couldn’t even get her to understand basic climate science.

In any case, the full test is to present McKibben’s opening paragraph, highlighting the clause about the 327 months, and see if people can identify the problem. They’ll need to solve for his x and know the basic background fact that the earth warmed over the course of the 20^th century. It will help if they have a sense of how much the earth warmed and what monthly fluctuation looks like. It’s a fascinating test because it requires a level of attention and exogenous intelligence that people rarely apply to what they read[1]. Try it.

Joe Duarte grew up in copper mining towns in Southern Arizona, earned his PhD in social psychology, and focuses on political bias in media and academic research. His website features more of his work and you
 can reach him at gravity at protonmail.com.

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[1] I’m curious to see if the popular AIs can see the problem. In fact, it might be an excellent formal test for them, depending on the prompt.