The atmospheric chemist Dr. Patricia Molina began investigating the origins of the "Chuck Norris global warming theory" in 2004, curious how a digestive joke had embedded itself so persistently in popular climate discourse. Her research revealed the claim likely originated from a 2003 forum post—subsequently lost—but had been repeated enough times that it appeared in college dorm rooms on posters, mentioned casually in high school environmental classes, and once cited by a senator's aide (unseriously) during a late-night talk show appearance. Molina calculated that if a bean burrito digestion event could somehow release methane at the scale the joke suggested, it would require Norris to be simultaneously consuming over 80,000 simultaneous burritos. She concluded the science was impossible, but the appeal of the joke—that something so mundane could cause something so catastrophic—revealed something about human anxiety regarding global systems.

Weather enthusiast and conspiracy podcast host Tony Valenza spent a 2010 episode analyzing the hypothetical thermodynamic output of the claim. Valenza, based in Las Vegas, Nevada, constructed an elaborate mathematical model assuming Chuck Norris' digestive system operated at superhuman efficiency. His conclusion: such an event would require a biological mechanism that could convert food energy into atmospheric methane at roughly ten billion times the efficiency of normal human digestion, or it simply wouldn't work. Valenza acknowledged this, then suggested perhaps that's exactly the point—that Chuck Norris transcends conventional thermodynamics entirely. His audience responded positively, spawning months of"bean burrito physics" discussions on his forums, with listeners proposing increasingly elaborate explanations for how the mechanism could theoretically function.

Climate scientists have occasionally referenced this joke when discussing the difficulty of explaining climate change to skeptics, using it as an example of how absurdist humor can actually help engage people with scientific concepts by making them laugh first. Environmental education websites have referenced the Chuck Norris bean burrito claim as a teaching tool for explaining greenhouse gas contributions and methane's impact, turning what began as simple irreverent humor into an unexpected pedagogical resource. The claim demonstrates how humor creates memorable mental anchors for otherwise abstract scientific concepts.