This is fine.
It’s been quite some time since I took stats, but wouldn’t six standard deviations put it in the true outlier category? If I’m even twenty percent correct in what I’m trying to communicate, that’s frightening.
Person who does lots of stats checking in. That’s a good question. We usually refer to Sigma (1-sigma, 2-sigma… 6-sigma) as the probability that an observation could occur by random chance.
The probability of 6-sigma occurring by random chance is about 1:1-billion.
So you’re definitely right to characterize it as an outlier. In terms of sea-ice this means that based on our observations of ice extent recorded going back to 1989 (based on the image) it is extremely unlikely we would expect to observe a sea ice extent so far below the norm suggesting something else (climate change) explains the deviation.
Been a while since I studied standard deviations but I remember 2 being already an outlier, 6 is a lot of deviation
I never took statistics, but 6 is at least triple the deviations of 2, and probably even more for math reasons I neither will nor can get into.
I did take statistics and forgot most of it, but I think I’m totally fine eating 2 hotdogs but the closer I get to 6 hotdogs, the increasingly more difficult it is.
If that’s not a tipping point then I seriously have no idea what’s coming.
Just a friendly and terrifying reminder that it’s currently WINTER in the southern hemisphere.
Though I would like to see the data compared to other El Nino years.
The El nina years are in there (the blue lines) none of them look like this year at all.
That said, this chart is not the best for understanding the actual extent of the sea ice. It doesn’t show the amount of sea ice, it show how much there is relative to earlier years. The actual amount of sea ice is still growing at the moment, as one would expect in winter. Just not as much as earlier years.
I did look into other articles about the Antarctic ice since this graph was only about how different one bit is to the next, rather than any numbers for it to gain any substantial meaning. From the other article I read, we are losing 150 billion tons of ice per year since 2010… and a factor of 6 change over that is… terrifying.
What makes this worse is this is the deviation from the 1991-2020 mean, the hottest period of recording. If we compared with even 1981-2000, it would be even worse.
