For those of you who are interested in statistics, this is a five-sigma event. So it's five standard deviations beyond the mean. Which means that if nothing had changed, we'd expect to see a winter like this about once every 7.5 million years."It's gobsmacking."
@ErikJonker @olivierlacan While I accept this is terrible news, I have some problems with how this is contextualized.
The standard deviation is only meaningful against a mean, and the mean we are using is Antractic sea ice extent 1991-2020 mean, so only ~30 years of data. It would be silly to extrapolate from that and say things like a "7.5 million year event" since we don't know how often this has (or hasn't) already occurred.
@ErikJonker The technical term seems to be "gobsmacking". My mathematician husband looked up from his morning coffee when I read him the article with that cross eyed look which denotes he's solving a tricky equation. Five sigma events don't happen until they do.
@ErikJonker
"leaving scientists baffled" Shocked and horrified I bet, baffled I doubt.
It's a weird journalistic quirk that only scientists are ever described as "baffled," when they have the most detailed and nuanced understanding of a problem but won't commit to a prediction.
Whereas pundits pulling opinions out of their arses and being factually wrong about nearly everything from one news cycle to the next are never "baffled" at all.
For some reason speaking in sigmas for that kind of reporting/numbers is way more effective (for me at least) that speaking in actual probability numbers.
Because 5 sigmas is something you never see in statistic lectures and science (also because the 95% confidence intervals are two sigmas I guess? I gives another darker perspective and really convey that the distribution is changing).
Add comment