The Sheet In 3 Sheets To The Wind Crossword Puzzle

July 2, 2024, 2:20 pm
Perish for that reason. With the population crash spread out over a decade, there would be ample opportunity for civilization's institutions to be torn apart and for hatreds to build, as armies tried to grab remaining resources simply to feed the people in their own countries. The sheet in 3 sheets to the wind crosswords eclipsecrossword. 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. Again, the difference between them amounts to nine to eighteen degrees—a range that may depend on how much ice there is to slow the responses. 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.
  1. The expression three sheets to the wind
  2. Three sheets in the wind meaning
  3. The sheet in 3 sheets to the wind crosswords eclipsecrossword

The Expression Three Sheets To The Wind

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. The expression three sheets to the wind. 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. 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. 5 million years ago, which is also when the ape-sized hominid brain began to develop into a fully human one, four times as large and reorganized for language, music, and chains of inference.

That, in turn, makes the air drier. 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. 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. Glaciers pushing out into the ocean usually break off in chunks. 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. Eventually such ice dams break, with spectacular results. 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. Three sheets in the wind meaning. What paleoclimate and oceanography researchers know of the mechanisms underlying such a climate flip suggests that global warming could start one in several different ways. The effects of an abrupt cold last for centuries.

Three Sheets In The Wind Meaning

Because such a cooling would occur too quickly for us to make readjustments in agricultural productivity and supply, it would be a potentially civilization-shattering affair, likely to cause an unprecedented population crash. Thermostats tend to activate heating or cooling mechanisms abruptly—also an example of a system that pushes back. Alas, further warming might well kick us out of the "high state. " Present-day Europe has more than 650 million people.

I call the colder one the "low state. " All we would need to do is open a channel through the ice dam with explosives before dangerous levels of water built up. Oceans are not well mixed at any time. Counting those tree-ring-like layers in the ice cores shows that cooling came on as quickly as droughts. When the ice cores demonstrated the abrupt onset of the Younger Dryas, researchers wanted to know how widespread this event was. If Europe had weather like Canada's, it could feed only one out of twenty-three present-day Europeans. We could go back to ice-age temperatures within a decade—and judging from recent discoveries, an abrupt cooling could be triggered by our current global-warming trend. Greenland looks like that, even on a cloudless day—but the great white mass between the occasional punctuations is an ice sheet. 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. Any meltwater coming in behind the dam stayed there. The system allows for large urban populations in the best of times, but not in the case of widespread disruptions. 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. 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. Salt circulates, because evaporation up north causes it to sink and be carried south by deep currents.

The Sheet In 3 Sheets To The Wind Crosswords Eclipsecrossword

Temperature records suggest that there is some grand mechanism underlying all of this, and that it has two major states. 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. 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. They might not be the end of Homo sapiens—written knowledge and elementary education might well endure—but the world after such a population crash would certainly be full of despotic governments that hated their neighbors because of recent atrocities. We can design for that in computer models of climate, just as architects design earthquake-resistant skyscrapers. Surprisingly, it may prove possible to prevent flip-flops in the climate—even by means of low-tech schemes. It could no longer do so if it lost the extra warming from the North Atlantic. We might undertake to regulate the Mediterranean's salty outflow, which is also thought to disrupt the North Atlantic Current. By 250, 000 years ago Homo erectushad died out, after a run of almost two million years. The discovery of abrupt climate changes has been spread out over the past fifteen years, and is well known to readers of major scientific journals such as Scienceand abruptness data are convincing. Because water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas, this decrease in average humidity would cool things globally. 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).

Implementing it might cost no more, in relative terms, than building a medieval cathedral. More rain falling in the northern oceans—exactly what is predicted as a result of global warming—could stop salt flushing. A slightly exaggerated version of our present know-something-do-nothing state of affairs is know-nothing-do-nothing: a reduction in science as usual, further limiting our chances of discovering a way out. 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. The Mediterranean waters flowing out of the bottom of the Strait of Gibraltar into the Atlantic Ocean are about 10 percent saltier than the ocean's average, and so they sink into the depths of the Atlantic. The modern world is full of objects and systems that exhibit "bistable" modes, with thresholds for flipping. 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. Indeed, we've had an unprecedented period of climate stability. North-south ocean currents help to redistribute equatorial heat into the temperate zones, supplementing the heat transfer by winds. History is full of withdrawals from knowledge-seeking, whether for reasons of fundamentalism, fatalism, or "government lite" economics. Fortunately, big parallel computers have proved useful for both global climate modeling and detailed modeling of ocean circulation.

A quick fix, such as bombing an ice dam, might then be possible. What could possibly halt the salt-conveyor belt that brings tropical heat so much farther north and limits the formation of ice sheets? 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. 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. But we may not have centuries for acquiring wisdom, and it would be wise to compress our learning into the years immediately ahead. Retained heat eventually melts the ice, in a cycle that recurs about every five years. In discussing the ice ages there is a tendency to think of warm as good—and therefore of warming as better.