The Great Climate Flip-Flop

July 5, 2024, 12:20 pm

A remarkable amount of specious reasoning is often encountered when we contemplate reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. By 1961 the oceanographer Henry Stommel, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, was beginning to worry that these warming currents might stop flowing if too much fresh water was added to the surface of the northern seas. Meaning of 3 sheets to the wind. At the same time that the Labrador Sea gets a lessening of the strong winds that aid salt sinking, Europe gets particularly cold winters. More rain falling in the northern oceans—exactly what is predicted as a result of global warming—could stop salt flushing.

Meaning Of 3 Sheets To The Wind

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. Europe's climate, obviously, is not like that of North America or Asia at the same latitudes. Stabilizing our flip-flopping climate is not a simple matter. The sheet in 3 sheets to the wind crossword. 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. Canada lacks Europe's winter warmth and rainfall, because it has no equivalent of the North Atlantic Current to preheat its eastbound weather systems.

To keep a bistable system firmly in one state or the other, it should be kept away from the transition threshold. The return to ice-age temperatures lasted 1, 300 years. Thus the entire lake can empty quickly. A muddle-through scenario assumes that we would mobilize our scientific and technological resources well in advance of any abrupt cooling problem, but that the solution wouldn't be simple. Any abrupt switch in climate would also disrupt food-supply routes. Abortive responses and rapid chattering between modes are common problems in nonlinear systems with not quite enough oomph—the reason that old fluorescent lights flicker. What is 3 sheets to the wind. 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). A cheap-fix scenario, such as building or bombing a dam, presumes that we know enough to prevent trouble, or to nip a developing problem in the bud. But just as vaccines and antibiotics presume much knowledge about diseases, their climatic equivalents presume much knowledge about oceans, atmospheres, and past climates. 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.

The Sheet In 3 Sheets To The Wind Crossword

We might, for example, anchor bargeloads of evaporation-enhancing surfactants (used in the southwest corner of the Dead Sea to speed potash production) upwind from critical downwelling sites, letting winds spread them over the ocean surface all winter, just to ensure later flushing. This salty waterfall is more like thirty Amazon Rivers combined. Fatalism, in other words, might well be foolish. Further investigation might lead to revisions in such mechanistic explanations, but the result of adding fresh water to the ocean surface is pretty standard physics. 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. To stabilize our flip-flopping climate we'll need to identify all the important feedbacks that control climate and ocean currents—evaporation, the reflection of sunlight back into space, and so on—and then estimate their relative strengths and interactions in computer models. A stabilized climate must have a wide "comfort zone, " and be able to survive the El Niños of the short term. N. London and Paris are close to the 49°N line that, west of the Great Lakes, separates the United States from Canada.

Large-scale flushing at both those sites is certainly a highly variable process, and perhaps a somewhat fragile one as well. The system allows for large urban populations in the best of times, but not in the case of widespread disruptions. Man-made global warming is likely to achieve exactly the opposite—warming Greenland and cooling the Greenland Sea. Ours is now a brain able to anticipate outcomes well enough to practice ethical behavior, able to head off disasters in the making by extrapolating trends. It then crossed the Atlantic and passed near the Shetland Islands around 1976.

What Is 3 Sheets To The Wind

There is also a great deal of unsalted water in Greenland's glaciers, just uphill from the major salt sinks. Of particular importance are combinations of climate variations—this winter, for example, we are experiencing both an El Niño and a North Atlantic Oscillation—because such combinations can add up to much more than the sum of their parts. Canada's agriculture supports about 28 million people. If Europe had weather like Canada's, it could feed only one out of twenty-three present-day Europeans. Implementing it might cost no more, in relative terms, than building a medieval cathedral. A lake surface cooling down in the autumn will eventually sink into the less-dense-because-warmer waters below, mixing things up. In the Greenland Sea over the 1980s salt sinking declined by 80 percent. Flying above the clouds often presents an interesting picture when there are mountains below.

Now only Greenland's ice remains, but the abrupt cooling in the last warm period shows that a flip can occur in situations much like the present one. When this happens, something big, with worldwide connections, must be switching into a new mode of operation. Surprisingly, it may prove possible to prevent flip-flops in the climate—even by means of low-tech schemes. But the regional record is poorly understood, and I know at least one reason why. Those who will not reason. 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. Any meltwater coming in behind the dam stayed there. Counting those tree-ring-like layers in the ice cores shows that cooling came on as quickly as droughts. Coring old lake beds and examining the types of pollen trapped in sediment layers led to the discovery, early in the twentieth century, of the Younger Dryas. The same thing happens in the Labrador Sea between Canada and the southern tip of Greenland. All we would need to do is open a channel through the ice dam with explosives before dangerous levels of water built up. Huge amounts of seawater sink at known downwelling sites every winter, with the water heading south when it reaches the bottom. There is, increasingly, international cooperation in response to catastrophe—but no country is going to be able to rely on a stored agricultural surplus for even a year, and any country will be reluctant to give away part of its surplus. Sometimes they sink to considerable depths without mixing.

Three Sheets In The Wind Meaning

We might undertake to regulate the Mediterranean's salty outflow, which is also thought to disrupt the North Atlantic Current. By 1987 the geochemist Wallace Broecker, of Columbia University, was piecing together the paleoclimatic flip-flops with the salt-circulation story and warning that small nudges to our climate might produce "unpleasant surprises in the greenhouse. North-south ocean currents help to redistribute equatorial heat into the temperate zones, supplementing the heat transfer by winds. Europe's climate could become more like Siberia's. Nothing like this happens in the Pacific Ocean, but the Pacific is nonetheless affected, because the sink in the Nordic Seas is part of a vast worldwide salt-conveyor belt. We are in a warm period now. The Atlantic would be even saltier if it didn't mix with the Pacific, in long, loopy currents. The scale of the response will be far beyond the bounds of regulation—more like when excess warming triggers fire extinguishers in the ceiling, ruining the contents of the room while cooling them down. Greenland's east coast has a profusion of fjords between 70°N and 80°N, including one that is the world's biggest. 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. Another sat on Hudson's Bay, and reached as far west as the foothills of the Rocky Mountains—where it pushed, head to head, against ice coming down from the Rockies. That's how our warm period might end too. What could possibly halt the salt-conveyor belt that brings tropical heat so much farther north and limits the formation of ice sheets? Subarctic ocean currents were reaching the southern California coastline, and Santa Barbara must have been as cold as Juneau is now.

Oceans are not well mixed at any time. Another underwater ridge line stretches from Greenland to Iceland and on to the Faeroe Islands and Scotland. Its effects are clearly global too, inasmuch as it is part of a long "salt conveyor" current that extends through the southern oceans into the Pacific. Although I don't consider this scenario to be the most likely one, it is possible that solutions could turn out to be cheap and easy, and that another abrupt cooling isn't inevitable. So could ice carried south out of the Arctic Ocean.

The Sheet In 3 Sheets To The Wind Crossword Puzzle Crosswords

In late winter the heavy surface waters sink en masse. Oslo is nearly at 60°N, as are Stockholm, Helsinki, and St. Petersburg; continue due east and you'll encounter Anchorage. Because water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas, this decrease in average humidity would cool things globally. That, in turn, makes the air drier. But we may not have centuries for acquiring wisdom, and it would be wise to compress our learning into the years immediately ahead.

Once the dam is breached, the rushing waters erode an ever wider and deeper path. It was initially hoped that the abrupt warmings and coolings were just an oddity of Greenland's weather—but they have now been detected on a worldwide scale, and at about the same time. 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. Civilizations accumulate knowledge, so we now know a lot about what has been going on, what has made us what we are. Change arising from some sources, such as volcanic eruptions, can be abrupt—but the climate doesn't flip back just as quickly centuries later. Perhaps computer simulations will tell us that the only robust solutions are those that re-create the ocean currents of three million years ago, before the Isthmus of Panama closed off the express route for excess-salt disposal.

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