Oh well. Civilisation was nice while it lasted.
Was it though? Must’ve been nice for those few that hoard all the wealth
Was it, though?
Yeah, you can only sort-of make that argument about the last couple of centuries, and you have to say that all the genocides were worth it for vaccines and a steady food supply to do so.
I’m not convinced civilisation could collapse entirely do to climate change, though. Break into small warring pieces maybe, but as long as there’s still arable land somewhere people aren’t just giving up. And even in the crazy 10C scenarios Antarctica stays on the cool side of temperate.
Modern infrastructure will collapse in very extreme climates. Even if humanity survives tribally, there is no way for civilization to develop. Easy access to all those sweet sweet oil is long gone. Alternate forms of energy won’t be possible for future tribal man without the steppingstone that is oil.
Modern infrastructure will collapse in very extreme climates.
I mean, the existing infrastructure will be stressed, sure. But it’s not like it hits 60C and all the roads and bridges instantly crumble. The question is if you can afford to fix your infrastructure when it does degrade, or if it becomes a losing battle. We forget but we’re so far above subsistence at this point; for most of human history almost everyone worked at producing food, and now it’s maybe 2% in the West. I think it’s very likely that we’ll keep something resembling civilisation going, if maybe a poorer version.
The bigger concern is if we decide to nuke ourselves fighting over who gets a slightly larger slice of the shrinking pie.
Alternate forms of energy won’t be possible for future tribal man without the steppingstone that is oil.
Nah. Steam engines can run on biomass too, and hydro/wind is just magnets and mechanical parts. Once you have enough industry to make your first solar panels, it’s off to the races. I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time researching exactly this. Fossil fuel makes it all a lot cheaper and easier to scale but you can do without from an engineering perspective.
Oh good, the evil narcissists with the armies of bootlickers will be able to survive by enslaving their followers and using their wealth to retreat to bunkers or uninhabited land masses. That sure bodes well for the future of humanity.
Same as it’s always been, right? I hold onto hope that the enlightenment will stick, but I can’t guarantee it.
“He he. I’m in danger.”
This is fine.
The cars are out to kill us. In 2020 it was 19 Toyota Coronas. Now it’s five Mitsubishi Sigmas!
On the plus side, Musk killed the Bluebird.
News like this makes me want to blow up an oil field.
Whats sigma?
Sigma balls. Am I doing this right?
For seriously though, its explained in the article:
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.
As was mentioned in another comment, it’s a statistical term that measures the standard deviation. It basically tells you how “far” from the center of the bell curve you are with your data points. The higher the sigma, the less likely it is that an observed event was a fluke.
For example, 1-sigma event has a ~37% chance of being a “coincidence”, and 2-sigma has a chance of about 4.5%.
In science, 3-sigma (0.135%) is the first publishable certainty, it’s when something becomes significant enough to start a discussion.
And 5-sigma is the most common threshold for claiming discovery. 5-sigma events have a 0.0000287% chance of being a coincidence or some random happenstance. Or one in 3.5 million.
Higgs boson discovery was announced after 5-sigma certainty was reached. It means that if that particle didn’t actually exist, the chance of the experiments producing observed results would be 1 in 3.5 mln.
It’s also used in business. Six sigma is the holy grail of “close to perfection”.
Interesting, haven’t heard about that. Can you give an example of how it’s used in business? What is actually measured?
I couldn’t do better than Wikipedia.
Thanks. So I guess it doesn’t really measure anything in that field. Looks more like a strategy guideline and a set of techniques.
If you read the section on etymology of the business term, it was referring to the metric of quality control. Basically it means your QC is so good that a bad unit gets shipped only a tiny fraction of the time.
Processes that operate with “six sigma quality” over the short term are assumed to produce long-term defect levels below 3.4 defects per million opportunities (DPMO). The 3.4 dpmo is based on a “shift” of ± 1.5 sigma explained by Mikel Harry.
Ligma balls
