Term 3 Sheets To The Wind

We can design for that in computer models of climate, just as architects design earthquake-resistant skyscrapers. We must be careful not to think of an abrupt cooling in response to global warming as just another self-regulatory device, a control system for cooling things down when it gets too hot. It would be especially nice to see another dozen major groups of scientists doing climate simulations, discovering the intervention mistakes as quickly as possible and learning from them. Even the tropics cool down by about nine degrees during an abrupt cooling, and it is hard to imagine what in the past could have disturbed the whole earth's climate on this scale. Europe is an anomaly.

• The sheet in 3 sheets to the wind crossword puzzle
• Define three sheets in the wind
• The sheet in 3 sheets to the wind crossword clue

The Sheet In 3 Sheets To The Wind Crossword Puzzle

By 250, 000 years ago Homo erectushad died out, after a run of almost two million years. Twenty thousand years ago a similar ice sheet lay atop the Baltic Sea and the land surrounding it. The North Atlantic Current is certainly something big, with the flow of about a hundred Amazon Rivers. Water that evaporates leaves its salt behind; the resulting saltier water is heavier and thus sinks. Rather than a vigorous program of studying regional climatic change, we see the shortsighted preaching of cheaper government at any cost. Like a half-beaten cake mix, with strands of egg still visible, the ocean has a lot of blobs and streams within it. The most recent big cooling started about 12, 700 years ago, right in the midst of our last global warming.

Though combating global warming is obviously on the agenda for preventing a cold flip, we could easily be blindsided by stability problems if we allow global warming per se to remain the main focus of our climate-change efforts. That's how our warm period might end too. The dam, known as the Isthmus of Panama, may have been what caused the ice ages to begin a short time later, simply because of the forced detour. That increased quantities of greenhouse gases will lead to global warming is as solid a scientific prediction as can be found, but other things influence climate too, and some people try to escape confronting the consequences of our pumping more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by supposing that something will come along miraculously to counteract them. If Europe had weather like Canada's, it could feed only one out of twenty-three present-day Europeans. Oceans are not well mixed at any time. The back and forth of the ice started 2. The last time an abrupt cooling occurred was in the midst of global warming.

Define Three Sheets In The Wind

Increasing amounts of sea ice and clouds could reflect more sunlight back into space, but the geochemist Wallace Broecker suggests that a major greenhouse gas is disturbed by the failure of the salt conveyor, and that this affects the amount of heat retained. Greenland's east coast has a profusion of fjords between 70°N and 80°N, including one that is the world's biggest. It has excellent soils, and largely grows its own food. Then it was hoped that the abrupt flips were somehow caused by continental ice sheets, and thus would be unlikely to recur, because we now lack huge ice sheets over Canada and Northern Europe. But just as vaccines and antibiotics presume much knowledge about diseases, their climatic equivalents presume much knowledge about oceans, atmospheres, and past climates. Fortunately, big parallel computers have proved useful for both global climate modeling and detailed modeling of ocean circulation. Many ice sheets had already half melted, dumping a lot of fresh water into the ocean. Our goal must be to stabilize the climate in its favorable mode and ensure that enough equatorial heat continues to flow into the waters around Greenland and Norway. We need more well-trained people, bigger computers, more coring of the ocean floor and silted-up lakes, more ships to drag instrument packages through the depths, more instrumented buoys to study critical sites in detail, more satellites measuring regional variations in the sea surface, and perhaps some small-scale trial runs of interventions. A quick fix, such as bombing an ice dam, might then be possible. The cold, dry winds blowing eastward off Canada evaporate the surface waters of the North Atlantic Current, and leave behind all their salt. So could ice carried south out of the Arctic Ocean.

We may not have centuries to spare, but any economy in which two percent of the population produces all the food, as is the case in the United States today, has lots of resources and many options for reordering priorities. For example, I can imagine that ocean currents carrying more warm surface waters north or south from the equatorial regions might, in consequence, cool the Equator somewhat. There is also a great deal of unsalted water in Greenland's glaciers, just uphill from the major salt sinks. To see how ocean circulation might affect greenhouse gases, we must try to account quantitatively for important nonlinearities, ones in which little nudges provoke great responses. They were formerly thought to be very gradual, with both air temperature and ice sheets changing in a slow, 100, 000-year cycle tied to changes in the earth's orbit around the sun. Another underwater ridge line stretches from Greenland to Iceland and on to the Faeroe Islands and Scotland. Sometimes they sink to considerable depths without mixing. The fact that excess salt is flushed from surface waters has global implications, some of them recognized two centuries ago. We are in a warm period now. It's happening right now:a North Atlantic Oscillation started in 1996. Such a conveyor is needed because the Atlantic is saltier than the Pacific (the Pacific has twice as much water with which to dilute the salt carried in from rivers). Timing could be everything, given the delayed effects from inch-per-second circulation patterns, but that, too, potentially has a low-tech solution: build dams across the major fjord systems and hold back the meltwater at critical times. We have to discover what has made the climate of the past 8, 000 years relatively stable, and then figure out how to prop it up.

The Sheet In 3 Sheets To The Wind Crossword Clue

Five months after the ice dam at the Russell fjord formed, it broke, dumping a cubic mile of fresh water in only twenty-four hours. Tropical swamps decrease their production of methane at the same time that Europe cools, and the Gobi Desert whips much more dust into the air. Change arising from some sources, such as volcanic eruptions, can be abrupt—but the climate doesn't flip back just as quickly centuries later. Thus the entire lake can empty quickly. To the long list of predicted consequences of global warming—stronger storms, methane release, habitat changes, ice-sheet melting, rising seas, stronger El Niños, killer heat waves—we must now add an abrupt, catastrophic cooling. When that annual flushing fails for some years, the conveyor belt stops moving and so heat stops flowing so far north—and apparently we're popped back into the low state. The effects of an abrupt cold last for centuries. Indeed, were another climate flip to begin next year, we'd probably complain first about the drought, along with unusually cold winters in Europe. Salt circulates, because evaporation up north causes it to sink and be carried south by deep currents. So freshwater blobs drift, sometimes causing major trouble, and Greenland floods thus have the potential to stop the enormous heat transfer that keeps the North Atlantic Current going strong. For a quarter century global-warming theorists have predicted that climate creep is going to occur and that we need to prevent greenhouse gases from warming things up, thereby raising the sea level, destroying habitats, intensifying storms, and forcing agricultural rearrangements. A lake surface cooling down in the autumn will eventually sink into the less-dense-because-warmer waters below, mixing things up.

Plummeting crop yields would cause some powerful countries to try to take over their neighbors or distant lands—if only because their armies, unpaid and lacking food, would go marauding, both at home and across the borders. Near a threshold one can sometimes observe abortive responses, rather like the act of stepping back onto a curb several times before finally running across a busy street. They are utterly unlike the changes that one would expect from accumulating carbon dioxide or the setting adrift of ice shelves from Antarctica. Indeed, we've had an unprecedented period of climate stability.