this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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collapse of the old society
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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.