Define 3 Sheets To The Wind
Europe's climate, obviously, is not like that of North America or Asia at the same latitudes. We puzzle over oddities, such as the climate of Europe. The same thing happens in the Labrador Sea between Canada and the southern tip of Greenland. In Greenland a given year's snowfall is compacted into ice during the ensuing years, trapping air bubbles, and so paleoclimate researchers have been able to glimpse ancient climates in some detail. Meaning of three sheets to the wind. There seems to be no way of escaping the conclusion that global climate flips occur frequently and abruptly. Its snout ran into the opposite side, blocking the fjord with an ice dam.
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- The expression three sheets to the wind
- Three sheets in the wind meaning
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Meaning Of Three Sheets To The Wind
In Broecker's view, failures of salt flushing cause a worldwide rearrangement of ocean currents, resulting in—and this is the speculative part—less evaporation from the tropics. The population-crash scenario is surely the most appalling. The expression three sheets to the wind. This El Niño-like shift in the atmospheric-circulation pattern over the North Atlantic, from the Azores to Greenland, often lasts a decade. 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. The North Atlantic Current is certainly something big, with the flow of about a hundred Amazon Rivers.
When the warm currents penetrate farther than usual into the northern seas, they help to melt the sea ice that is reflecting a lot of sunlight back into space, and so the earth becomes warmer. 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. The sheet in 3 sheets to the wind crossword puzzle. We are near the end of a warm period in any event; ice ages return even without human influences on climate. Volcanos spew sulfates, as do our own smokestacks, and these reflect some sunlight back into space, particularly over the North Atlantic and Europe.
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This scenario does not require that the shortsighted be in charge, only that they have enough influence to put the relevant science agencies on starvation budgets and to send recommendations back for yet another commission report due five years hence. 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. Were fjord floods causing flushing to fail, because the downwelling sites were fairly close to the fjords, it is obvious that we could solve the problem. It's the high state that's good, and we may need to help prevent any sudden transition to the cold low state. Perish for that reason. The system allows for large urban populations in the best of times, but not in the case of widespread disruptions. From there it was carried northward by the warm Norwegian Current, whereupon some of it swung west again to arrive off Greenland's east coast—where it had started its inch-per-second journey.
Any meltwater coming in behind the dam stayed there. In an abrupt cooling the problem would get worse for decades, and much of the earth would be affected. 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. 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. This was posited in 1797 by the Anglo-American physicist Sir Benjamin Thompson (later known, after he moved to Bavaria, as Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire), who also posited that, if merely to compensate, there would have to be a warmer northbound current as well. An abrupt cooling got started 8, 200 years ago, but it aborted within a century, and the temperature changes since then have been gradual in comparison. Man-made global warming is likely to achieve exactly the opposite—warming Greenland and cooling the Greenland Sea.
The Sheet In 3 Sheets To The Wind Crossword Puzzle
This major change in ocean circulation, along with a climate that had already been slowly cooling for millions of years, led not only to ice accumulation most of the time but also to climatic instability, with flips every few thousand years or so. The effects of an abrupt cold last for centuries. I hope never to see a failure of the northernmost loop of the North Atlantic Current, because the result would be a population crash that would take much of civilization with it, all within a decade. We might undertake to regulate the Mediterranean's salty outflow, which is also thought to disrupt the North Atlantic Current. It, too, has a salty waterfall, which pours the hypersaline bottom waters of the Nordic Seas (the Greenland Sea and the Norwegian Sea) south into the lower levels of the North Atlantic Ocean. The return to ice-age temperatures lasted 1, 300 years. We must look at arriving sunlight and departing light and heat, not merely regional shifts on earth, to account for changes in the temperature balance. If Europe had weather like Canada's, it could feed only one out of twenty-three present-day Europeans.
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. Twice a year they sink, carrying their load of atmospheric gases downward. This produces a heat bonus of perhaps 30 percent beyond the heat provided by direct sunlight to these seas, accounting for the mild winters downwind, in northern Europe. It's happening right now:a North Atlantic Oscillation started in 1996. For Europe to be as agriculturally productive as it is (it supports more than twice the population of the United States and Canada), all those cold, dry winds that blow eastward across the North Atlantic from Canada must somehow be warmed up. But sometimes a glacial surge will act like an avalanche that blocks a road, as happened when Alaska's Hubbard glacier surged into the Russell fjord in May of 1986. 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. 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.
The Expression Three Sheets To The Wind
In almost four decades of subsequent research Henry Stommel's theory has only been enhanced, not seriously challenged. 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. It has excellent soils, and largely grows its own food. It then crossed the Atlantic and passed near the Shetland Islands around 1976. To keep a bistable system firmly in one state or the other, it should be kept away from the transition threshold.
But to address how all these nonlinear mechanisms fit together—and what we might do to stabilize the climate—will require some speculation. 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. Eventually such ice dams break, with spectacular results. 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. The last warm period abruptly terminated 13, 000 years after the abrupt warming that initiated it, and we've already gone 15, 000 years from a similar starting point. There is also a great deal of unsalted water in Greenland's glaciers, just uphill from the major salt sinks.
Three Sheets In The Wind Meaning
There are a few obvious precursors to flushing failure. The only reason that two percent of our population can feed the other 98 percent is that we have a well-developed system of transportation and middlemen—but it is not very robust. And it sometimes changes its route dramatically, much as a bus route can be truncated into a shorter loop. But just as vaccines and antibiotics presume much knowledge about diseases, their climatic equivalents presume much knowledge about oceans, atmospheres, and past climates. Keeping the present climate from falling back into the low state will in any case be a lot easier than trying to reverse such a change after it has occurred. A lake surface cooling down in the autumn will eventually sink into the less-dense-because-warmer waters below, mixing things up. The back and forth of the ice started 2.
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. If blocked by ice dams, fjords make perfect reservoirs for meltwater. There is another part of the world with the same good soil, within the same latitudinal band, which we can use for a quick comparison. In late winter the heavy surface waters sink en masse. It keeps northern Europe about nine to eighteen degrees warmer in the winter than comparable latitudes elsewhere—except when it fails. The most recent big cooling started about 12, 700 years ago, right in the midst of our last global warming. We now know that there's nothing "glacially slow" about temperature change: superimposed on the gradual, long-term cycle have been dozens of abrupt warmings and coolings that lasted only centuries. Salt circulates, because evaporation up north causes it to sink and be carried south by deep currents. By 1971-1972 the semi-salty blob was off Newfoundland.
Define Three Sheets In The Wind
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. Indeed, were another climate flip to begin next year, we'd probably complain first about the drought, along with unusually cold winters in Europe. 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. Temperature records suggest that there is some grand mechanism underlying all of this, and that it has two major states. Fjords are long, narrow canyons, little arms of the sea reaching many miles inland; they were carved by great glaciers when the sea level was lower. There used to be a tropical shortcut, an express route from Atlantic to Pacific, but continental drift connected North America to South America about three million years ago, damming up the easy route for disposing of excess salt. 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.
Thermostats tend to activate heating or cooling mechanisms abruptly—also an example of a system that pushes back. Only the most naive gamblers bet against physics, and only the most irresponsible bet with their grandchildren's resources. Recovery would be very slow. Ways to postpone such a climatic shift are conceivable, however—old-fashioned dam-and-ditch construction in critical locations might even work. North-south ocean currents help to redistribute equatorial heat into the temperate zones, supplementing the heat transfer by winds. Glaciers pushing out into the ocean usually break off in chunks. Then not only Europe but also, to everyone's surprise, the rest of the world gets chilled. The last abrupt cooling, the Younger Dryas, drastically altered Europe's climate as far east as Ukraine.
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Instead we would try one thing after another, creating a patchwork of solutions that might hold for another few decades, allowing the search for a better stabilizing mechanism to continue. More rain falling in the northern oceans—exactly what is predicted as a result of global warming—could stop salt flushing. 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. Paleoclimatic records reveal that any notion we may once have had that the climate will remain the same unless pollution changes it is wishful thinking. Rather than a vigorous program of studying regional climatic change, we see the shortsighted preaching of cheaper government at any cost. Water that evaporates leaves its salt behind; the resulting saltier water is heavier and thus sinks. Medieval cathedral builders learned from their design mistakes over the centuries, and their undertakings were a far larger drain on the economic resources and people power of their day than anything yet discussed for stabilizing the climate in the twenty-first century.
Because water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas, this decrease in average humidity would cool things globally. Ancient lakes near the Pacific coast of the United States, it turned out, show a shift to cold-weather plant species at roughly the time when the Younger Dryas was changing German pine forests into scrublands like those of modern Siberia.