4 ms·

This title is a really nice way to put "our model is really inaccurate". Regardless of how bad the news is, it's a statement about human misunderstanding.

defrost 3y ago
That's a poor take - the models we have for climate predict warming and ice retreating. This event: "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. is only unusual in stasis, only unusual if no change was occurring, etc. This is either: * A very very very unusual outlier event, OR * a clear sign that something is going on that is causing polar ocean and atmosphere to warm ( current models point toward the second case -- ie they're looking pretty accurate )
- jlmorton 3y ago
  I'm not sure that's what the other poster was saying. We say this is a 5-sigma event, but that's based on observations of the mean since 1979. When you then try to extrapolate out from that and say "we expect to see this once every 7.5 million years," you have entered into a state of deep bullshit.
  - defrost 3y ago
    It'd be better phrased as If the thirty year median satelite data 1981 - 2010 is the "normal state", Then this years ice extent is more than five standard deviations (in one direction) from the mean of observed data, and we'd expect such an event to happen once in every 7.5 million "samples". However badly phrased the journalistic reporting of a researchr speaking casually gets there's not actual underlying intent that anything is being extrapolated forward or backward in time. Simply the observation that most antartic sea ice extant data is tightly clumped and that this year (amd last year) represent either a very unusual event or a marked departure from "normal". This may help visualise the data better: https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/ https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-... ( click the antartic button to switch poles; the default is to grey the thrirty year normal data band and to only show last year and this year, other choices can be made by selection on the data table )

defrost 3y ago

That's a poor take - the models we have for climate predict warming and ice retreating. This event: "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. is only unusual in stasis, only unusual if no change was occurring, etc. This is either: * A very very very unusual outlier event, OR * a clear sign that something is going on that is causing polar ocean and atmosphere to warm ( current models point toward the second case -- ie they're looking pretty accurate )

jlmorton 3y ago
I'm not sure that's what the other poster was saying. We say this is a 5-sigma event, but that's based on observations of the mean since 1979. When you then try to extrapolate out from that and say "we expect to see this once every 7.5 million years," you have entered into a state of deep bullshit.
- defrost 3y ago
  It'd be better phrased as If the thirty year median satelite data 1981 - 2010 is the "normal state", Then this years ice extent is more than five standard deviations (in one direction) from the mean of observed data, and we'd expect such an event to happen once in every 7.5 million "samples". However badly phrased the journalistic reporting of a researchr speaking casually gets there's not actual underlying intent that anything is being extrapolated forward or backward in time. Simply the observation that most antartic sea ice extant data is tightly clumped and that this year (amd last year) represent either a very unusual event or a marked departure from "normal". This may help visualise the data better: https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/ https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-... ( click the antartic button to switch poles; the default is to grey the thrirty year normal data band and to only show last year and this year, other choices can be made by selection on the data table )