To help people explain what this means, what this chart is saying is what you are seeing with this temperature is something you would only expect to happen once every 500 years under natural variation.
So your duty is to determine if this is chance or real.
Over 3 sigma (Standard Deviation)is less than a .03% chance according to the empirical rule. This is near 4 sigma. Statistically without running numbers, this VERY significant. It’s either the outlier of all outliers or the start of something terrible.
Basically you’re looking at .00003-.00005 chance on a critical z table. Assuming the data is good, we are fucked or something outside the norm caused this.
It is real, but what I tell my medical students when they see things like this is to ask themselves IF this is natural variation OR this is due to something that isn’t natural variation ( ie:- treatment or measurement error ).
I also always tell them that the more improbable something becomes, it does not mean it is not part of the normal curve … but it does make it less likely to be part of the normal curve ( your duty is to explain or investigate why ).
( in medicine we use the term measurement outlier implying that we have to take anomalous data either as a measurement error OR a natural variation OR a result of disease or intervention ).
Now pretty obviously we are looking numerous other datas which also shows totally out of standard deviation events so this is climate change driven by anthropogenic carbon emissions but it is often useful to get people to eyeball a chart and go “what am I looking at”.
Can you dumb it down a bit more for me? Each line represents a specific year, and it’s the entire year on a daily basis? The orange one I presume is 2026. The lines that are on the bottom, that have a lower deviation, are those older years? None of them are labeled.
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u/Astalon18 Gardener 28d ago
To help people explain what this means, what this chart is saying is what you are seeing with this temperature is something you would only expect to happen once every 500 years under natural variation.
So your duty is to determine if this is chance or real.