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Antarctic sea ice extent is now 6 standard deviations below normal (europe.pub)
submitted 3 years ago by [M] to c/collapse@slrpnk.net
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[–] 0 points 3 years ago (2 children)

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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    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.

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