In case you didn’t need other reasons to be skeptical of today’s proposed “boobquake” response to (yet another) religious leader’s claim that women’s immodesty brings down the wrath of god, Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy point out a strictly pragmatic, statistical problem that…

...has to do with the number of earthquakes around the world. Here is a table from the USGS giving the number of earthquakes per year listed by magnitude:

As you’d expect, there are very few huge quakes, and a lot of little ones. We expect to rack up maybe one quake more powerful than magnitude 8 in a year, but on average we get one in the magnitude 6 – 6.9 range every couple of days somewhere in the world, and one in the 5 – 5.9 range something like three to five times every day. That’s every few hours!

And there’s the weakness in the Boobquake plan. The idea of Boobquake is to debunk the cleric by saying that women can reveal their boobs and not start a seismic event (ignoring perhaps the tremors caused by geek guys habitually running to their computers every few minutes and checking for updates). But without defining the time period, the earthquake size, and the region in advance, this can actually reinforce the cleric’s claims! Given the huge tracts of land involved, no matter when women of the world unveil their decolletage, there is bound to be a magnitude 5 quake within an hour or so of the event, and a mag 6 quake within a day.

We also know that supernatural thinking makes people see correlations where none exist, and to also retroactively assign credit after an event to something that happened before it. They cling desperately to such measures like a drowning man to a life preserver. And when the parameters (like time and size) aren’t defined in advance, that makes uncritical thinking easier. If there is even a modest earthquake today, then that cleric can declare victory. If there’s a big quake, then it’s more like sending that drowning man a motorboat!

He said it here.

Of course a table similar to the USGS earthquake table could be drawn showing the number of dire imprecations and condemnations made by clerics, ministers, rabbis, priests, shamans, and right-wing pundits blaming women or LGBT people for earthquakes and, well, everything they think is wrong with the world. Although it would be a much bigger table. Which means on any given day it’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t. And as the Alice character in the Dilbert comic said years ago, “if success is impossible then… I’m… free! The result will be the same no matter what I do.” So today, just like any other day, wear whatever you wanted to wear anyway.