If you flip a coin 342 times and it lands on nothing but tails, common sense suggests there might be something other than pure chance at play.
The same common sense doesn't seem to apply when it comes to developing policies to tackle climate change.
The world has just experienced its 342nd consecutive month of hotter-than-average temperatures, according to data collected by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That's a run of more than 28 years.
And Australia has just had its warmest 12 months since modern records began – which is stunningly unusual, given we've just experienced a double-dip La Nina cycle, meaning it should now be cooler than average, not hotter than ever.
Yet Australia is on the cusp of dismantling much of its climate change policy infrastructure, shrinking the roles of some of its key scientists and advisers, and plunging the nation into a further round of bickering over global warming.
For all its many, many faults and missteps in climate policy over the past six years, Labor has finally put in place a suite of reforms that can meet Australia's international pledges, start the job of steeling the nation against future climate-related shocks, and position us to take advantage of opportunities in solar and wind energy. In the emissions trading scheme, it has also built the mechanism to control Australia's greenhouse gas output as required.
The Coalition has spent the past six years insisting that it would respect Australia's bipartisan minimum commitments on greenhouse gas cuts.
The main selling point of its Direct Action plan was always that it could allegedly do the same job as the government's carbon price – cut emissions to 5 per cent below their 2000 level by 2020 – but do it more cheaply.
Now, with an election win all but assured, Tony Abbott has casually suggested that it might not in fact be able to do the job. If tackling climate change costs too much, then too bad, Abbott told the National Press Club on Monday.
Of course, it is still just possible that Australia could muddle through to a 5 per cent emissions cut over the next six-and-a-bit years without a carbon price, due to the growth of renewable energy and a drop in demand. But without a cap on emissions, the situation will be largely out of the public's control, and will rest in large part upon the whims of the big mining and manufacturing corporations.
In addition to the pledge to axe the carbon tax, the Coalition has promised massive cuts to renewable energy support, and says it will abolish the government's independent advisory panel, the Climate Change Authority, and the Climate Commission, the agency tasked with communicating climate change science to the public.
In all likelihood, this policy infrastructure will have to be rebuilt from the ground up in three or six years' time.
When asked if the record-breaking heat along Australia's east coast is evidence of climate change, Tony Abbott told ABC television at the weekend: "It is evidence of the variability in our weather." He then added: "I think that climate change is real, and humanity makes a contribution."
That dual position – which Abbott has clung to with impressive tenacity for four years – seems to straddle two contradictory belief systems.
On the one hand there is a stated theoretical belief in the physics that show human-induced climate change is happening, and on the other a flat denial of any piece of practical evidence that supports that theory.
With the election three days away, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Coalition's Direct Action plan is guided by this dual philosophy. The opposition still insists it will do as much as the government will to reduce greenhouse emissions, even though all available evidence suggests the opposite.
Several attempts to model Australia's emissions trajectory out to 2020 under the Direct Action policy have the nation massively overshooting its climate goals. None have it meeting its target, unless billions more are spent on paying polluters to cut emissions.
It is the kind of doublethink that would have us endlessly flipping coins, vainly hoping and against all evidence that 342 "tails" in a row is just random chance.
Ben Cubby is environment editor.