I'm finding it a little hard to work today with this in my head.
Antarctic ice extent is now 6.4 standard deviations below the mean. That is, I'm reliably told, a one in 13 billion year event.
We're about to see a lot of shit hit a lot of fans. And we are far from ready.
Business as usual is over. Politics as usual is over. We need to be putting our effort into building systems that can help us survive what greed and power and wilful blindness have wrought.
@timhollo This terrifies me. Also, I read this post, which also terrifies me: https://mastodon.social/deck/@SamYourEyes@mas.to/110227325339079681 Here's a quote from the abstract: "Climate change will cause agricultural failure and subsequent collapse of hyperfragile modern civilization, likely within 10–15 years."
@polgeonow it’s a probability factor. It “would” happen randomly, under the same conditions, once in the history of the universe. In other words, this is not possibly random. It’s driven by the fact that we’ve utterly changed the conditions.
@timhollo Thanks. I see that now - the source I found for it online put it a little more clearly, IMO, clarifying that it was the probability of it happening "if the climate was stable".
@aral This is not a daily but a yearly event, according to your table with 6.5\sigma and translating daily into yearly the approx of 1 in 13 billion does not seem of by much @timhollo@TomQuinn
@aral That depends how you see the problem. This is one in number of independent events. Ice extend from one day to the next are probably not independent event. @timhollo@TomQuinn
@derle@aral@timhollo@TomQuinn It's a yearly measurement on a specific date each year, if I understand the chart correctly, so the period is a year.
The 13 billion year claim is a bit misleading, and is probably referring to how rarely this measurement would occur if the ice extent was random around this mean+std, which I'm pretty sure doesn't hold here.
Anyway, using deviation from the mean as a way to illustrate how far we are from the recent normal is valid enough, and certainly alarming.
@derle@aral@timhollo@TomQuinn Ok, so I think Aral is correct here that this is daily not yearly means, so then it should be millions. Which is anyway a moot point because this isn't a realistic way to interpret the data.
Also, @ZLabe's website uses a 5 day moving window, which looks a bit smoother. You can still see the same pattern though.
@aral@derle@timhollo@TomQuinn your argument is that the amount of Arctic sea ice is randomly determined on a daily basis? That each individual day is a separate event? You think that tomorrow, we could randomly be at +2 std deviations?
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