In an earlier POST I discussed the broad dimensions of the lie that “this month was the 8th hottest ever”. I discussed this earlier from a top-down perspective where I showed that the data is expected to show exactly that and that this data is obviously worthless in determining a trend. In fact, as I showed, we would be SURPRISED to NOT find the hottest decade ever in the last decade. Now I tackle the question from a statistical point of view. Why is this a common and rather stupid mistake to make?