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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 t

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 )