Antarctic sea ice levels dive in 'five-sigma event', as experts flag worsening consequences for planet

Nah. Antarctica will still have winters even in the craziest scenarios.

Was it though? Must’ve been nice for those few that hoard all the wealth

This is fine.

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.