"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.
[...]
She fears a further change in the balance could trigger a tipping point from where it's difficult to reverse the trajectory. "We might end up in a new state," she said. "That would be quite concerning to the sustainability of human conditions on Earth, I suspect.
At this point I feel like either every post about the worsening of climate change on the internet - whether it's here, or on twitter, or on reddit, needs to be automatically converted into a warcry to detonate pipelines and murder billionaires, or else I don't really wanna see it because it's just making everyone feel worse without any actual action being taken. How many more times do I need to hear "AAAAAAA WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE"? Like, I'm ready to guillotine some oil barons guys. I'm already there. I just need everyone else to do it with me.
The problem is that a lot of developed countries that could do more have an army of right-wingers ready to fight anyone that dare tells them to put the treats down and do something.
at this point i feel like the analogy of monkeys accidentally starting a forest fire is accurate
the monkeys are technically capable of putting it out, it's just statistically unlikely and would require many coincidences and the monkeys have no idea how it happened in the first place so it would probably just happen again given enough time
“Decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen” but the thing happening is climate change
Honestly scientists need to stop saying “might” — I get that it’s more accurate, but everything after that word falls on deaf ears
It's summer in Antarctica right now... wait...
No joke, I actually had a co-worker declare loudly "Summer is summer everywhere! Are you stupid?"
Could we (I'm sure it's not just me) - get a ELI5 for standard deviation?
If you throw darts at a bullseye and are good at it, most will hit near thr bullseye and fewer and fewer will hit the farther away you get.
Scientists will often take their models and data and say, "okay how far off were we?" as if the model were the dart board and the data was one or more throws.
Standard deviation is a standardized measure of how far one is from the center of the distribution of "dart throws". For the very common bell curve (Gaussian distribution), it's a particular distance from the mean value.
In practical terms, they're saying they threw a dart and it ended up two blocks away. The model is wrong now - the world doesn't work like it used to and how it waa predicted to work.
Just to be clear, it's not 5 standard deviations off of modeled ice, it's 5 off of previously observed ice. I'm assuming at the cross section where the difference is deepest. Taking the time series from this year in total, it looks more like 3 or 4 sds off the mean
Thank you for sharing some of your "I Fucking <3 Math!" stand up routine. We are honored.
The whole act is just longer and shorter versions of the same one joke, something about their identity matrix being an attack helicopter? You know, right-multiplication "humour"?
In this context it's about the statistical significance of an event. Here it means that Antarctica not having ice is due to something like climate change, because the occurrence is so outside normal parameters.
Most complex random things follow a normal distribution. These have a mean (average value), and standard deviation (how spread out from the mean it is). If you get some measurement of your random thing, you can tell how likely that was by checking how many standard deviations away from the mean it is.
Within one standard deviation - happens 68% of the time
Within two standard deviations - happens 95% of the time
Within three standard deviations - happens 99.7% of the time
Within four standard deviations - happens 99.993% of the time
Within five standard deviations - happens 99.99994% of the time
Within six standard deviations - happens 99.9999998% of the time
Five standard deviations is the threshold where even particle physicists will say, "Yeah bullshit that happened at random, something else is going on here."
It's a shame the American media makes no effort to explain this stuff and instead they idiotically use vague phrases and adjectives.
[Edit: Of course - they usually entirely ignore stuff like this.]
at some point we're gonna need to merge c/doomer and c/news, probably in the next couple years
Probably going to need a scarier name than " Blue Ocean" .
That just sounds nice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rule#Table_of_numerical_values
5σ events happen once per 4776 years for a daily thing. One time in 1,744,278
Humans wanted this to happen. They destroyed the environment and they think it's funny.
Why is environmental destruction so popular with the masses? Do they not go outside? Do they think it makes them look badass or something?
Humans wanted this to happen.
Nah. Everyone currently alive was born after the machinery of climate change was already set in motion. I don't think even the ruling class "wanted" this to happen because it threatens their comfortable lives as well. They just wanted infinite growth on a finite planet, because they're delusional and their ideology is on autopilot. That's not the same as wanting climate change, because wanting climate change at least acknowledges it as a real thing that is happening.
I think what happened is that generalized commodity production, industrialization, colonialism, and imperialism came together to create the perfect storm of irreversible climate change. After all, the only way for the imperial periphery, that is, the "third world" to get the boot of the imperial core ("first world") off of its neck, is to industrialize, build up arsenals of nuclear and conventional weapons, etc, and defend themselves from imperialism. But in the process of building up the productive forces and the means to defend themselves, they become part of what is driving climate change. What is driving climate change is an arms race of wasteful overproduction for the sake of "self defense" between nations that view each other as threats. We're in a global prisoner dilemma where every party has a short term incentive to ignore the long term problem. In a situation like that, individuals can go against the grain, but it has not yet been statistically enough to reverse the general course of things.
If you and I went out tomorrow and threw literally every fossil fuel executive down a mineshaft, it would not change the general character of production as a whole, nor would it change the global transportation networks that are already in place and hooked on fossil fuels. Nor would it stop the generalized process of extraction, production, and pollution that drives climate change.
If you and I went out tomorrow and threw literally every fossil fuel executive down a mineshaft, it would not change the general character of production as a whole, nor would it change the global transportation networks that are already in place and hooked on fossil fuels. Nor would it stop the generalized process of extraction, production, and pollution that drives climate change.
Yeah but it'd make me feel better (speaking entirely hypothetically).
Nobody here is saying you shouldn’t do it anyway (hypothetically)
I think part of the problem is that the chain of societies we've built is plain too complex for anyone to really keep under control or even effectively coordinate, too. Even by the people who think they grasp enough of it to get a rein on it. At scale, a lot of systems take on lives of their own.
The scariest version of world leadership is a lack of it. And we're living that.
It's a bunch of rich assholes convinced of their own genius all picking apart what's left of global infrastructure to build their little piles of vanity, all expecting handlers to fix things that they continue to break.
Good news: you will no longer have to worry about your student debt bad news: hope you can swim
i heard there was an event?
:sigma-male: :sigma-male: :sigma-male: :sigma-male: :sigma-male:
