It's intriguing what data is considered to be the most title-worthy in cases like this. If anything, the claims made in the first paragraph seem to <i>undersell</i> the severity of this, since a single data point's order statistic says little about the overall trend. Far more damming is Figure 2b, which shows linear regressions and ranges for three time periods. Unlike the order statistics in the intro/title, this figure is quite irrefutable.