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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. 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. 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. Many ice sheets had already half melted, dumping a lot of fresh water into the ocean. 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. Futurists have learned to bracket the future with alternative scenarios, each of which captures important features that cluster together, each of which is compact enough to be seen as a narrative on a human scale. This El Niño-like shift in the atmospheric-circulation pattern over the North Atlantic, from the Azores to Greenland, often lasts a decade.

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Present-day Europe has more than 650 million people. The same thing happens in the Labrador Sea between Canada and the southern tip of Greenland. In late winter the heavy surface waters sink en masse. 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. N. London and Paris are close to the 49°N line that, west of the Great Lakes, separates the United States from Canada. Glaciers pushing out into the ocean usually break off in chunks. Seawater is more complicated, because salt content also helps to determine whether water floats or sinks. Water that evaporates leaves its salt behind; the resulting saltier water is heavier and thus sinks.

To keep a bistable system firmly in one state or the other, it should be kept away from the transition threshold. 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. 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. 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. But just as vaccines and antibiotics presume much knowledge about diseases, their climatic equivalents presume much knowledge about oceans, atmospheres, and past climates. 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. This tends to stagger the imagination, immediately conjuring up visions of terraforming on a science-fiction scale—and so we shake our heads and say, "Better to fight global warming by consuming less, " and so forth. North-south ocean currents help to redistribute equatorial heat into the temperate zones, supplementing the heat transfer by winds. All we would need to do is open a channel through the ice dam with explosives before dangerous levels of water built up.

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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. A lake formed, rising higher and higher—up to the height of an eight-story building. Whereas the familiar consequences of global warming will force expensive but gradual adjustments, the abrupt cooling promoted by man-made warming looks like a particularly efficient means of committing mass suicide. Stabilizing our flip-flopping climate is not a simple matter. 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. By 250, 000 years ago Homo erectushad died out, after a run of almost two million years. Berlin is up at about 52°, Copenhagen and Moscow at about 56°. Huge amounts of seawater sink at known downwelling sites every winter, with the water heading south when it reaches the bottom. 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. Any meltwater coming in behind the dam stayed there. The job is done by warm water flowing north from the tropics, as the eastbound Gulf Stream merges into the North Atlantic Current.

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. Twice a year they sink, carrying their load of atmospheric gases downward. Eventually such ice dams break, with spectacular results. Change arising from some sources, such as volcanic eruptions, can be abrupt—but the climate doesn't flip back just as quickly centuries later. It could no longer do so if it lost the extra warming from the North Atlantic. 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. 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. 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. Now we know—and from an entirely different group of scientists exploring separate lines of reasoning and data—that the most catastrophic result of global warming could be an abrupt cooling. The fjords of Greenland offer some dramatic examples of the possibilities for freshwater floods. Door latches suddenly give way. These northern ice sheets were as high as Greenland's mountains, obstacles sufficient to force the jet stream to make a detour. Suppose we had reports that winter salt flushing was confined to certain areas, that abrupt shifts in the past were associated with localized flushing failures, andthat one computer model after another suggested a solution that was likely to work even under a wide range of weather extremes.

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Its snout ran into the opposite side, blocking the fjord with an ice dam. 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. Natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes are less troubling than abrupt coolings for two reasons: they're short (the recovery period starts the next day) and they're local or regional (unaffected citizens can help the overwhelmed). It's happening right now:a North Atlantic Oscillation started in 1996. The return to ice-age temperatures lasted 1, 300 years. 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.

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Fortunately, big parallel computers have proved useful for both global climate modeling and detailed modeling of ocean circulation. Counting those tree-ring-like layers in the ice cores shows that cooling came on as quickly as droughts. 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. 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. Feedbacks are what determine thresholds, where one mode flips into another. The populous parts of the United States and Canada are mostly between the latitudes of 30° and 45°, whereas the populous parts of Europe are ten to fifteen degrees farther north.

Man-made global warming is likely to achieve exactly the opposite—warming Greenland and cooling the Greenland Sea. Thus the entire lake can empty quickly. Europe's climate, obviously, is not like that of North America or Asia at the same latitudes. "Southerly" Rome lies near the same latitude, 42°N, as "northerly" Chicago—and the most northerly major city in Asia is Beijing, near 40°. In 1970 it arrived in the Labrador Sea, where it prevented the usual salt sinking. 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. This salty waterfall is more like thirty Amazon Rivers combined.

Unlike most ocean currents, the North Atlantic Current has a return loop that runs deep beneath the ocean surface. Scientists have known for some time that the previous warm period started 130, 000 years ago and ended 117, 000 years ago, with the return of cold temperatures that led to an ice age. We need heat in the right places, such as the Greenland Sea, and not in others right next door, such as Greenland itself. Eventually that helps to melt ice sheets elsewhere. Flying above the clouds often presents an interesting picture when there are mountains below. When this happens, something big, with worldwide connections, must be switching into a new mode of operation. Our civilizations began to emerge right after the continental ice sheets melted about 10, 000 years ago. A brief, large flood of fresh water might nudge us toward an abrupt cooling even if the dilution were insignificant when averaged over time. There are a few obvious precursors to flushing failure.