this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
356 points (99.4% liked)
collapse of the old society
972 readers
30 users here now
to discuss news and stuff of the old world dying
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.