Coming to you from scientists who, apparently, just want to wag their tongues for two minutes in the sun, are two stories in the “silly, but not science” category.

First, are observations from Christina Archer of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Stanford, who says the jet streams, those giant rivers of air that push storms around the globe, are moving toward both the northern and southern poles. Of course, the culprit is, supposedly, global warming.

Well now, it’s not that I can’t believe it; it well may be. But first I’d have to see significant studies with understandable and scientific documentation to believe it.

But assuming that Christina and her colleagues are correct, and that the jet streams are moving toward the poles at a rate of 1.25 miles per year, saying it’s connected to global warming just doesn’t wash. They give no evidence of it, because they can’t. But she also says that because of the expanding tropical area between the two jet streams, “Changes to the jets mean changes to the storms, and changes to the storms means changes in precipitation, changes in how much rain and how much snow we can count on.”

Well, I could have come to that conclusion just by looking out the window on any given day. There are no two storms alike, and the greatest variable on the planet is the changes in rainfall and snowfall. So where’s the science?

But there's more. While her study did not focus on hurricanes, she still weighed in with the politically correct hurricane predictions for planet Earth saying the possibility that a shift in the jet streams away from where hurricanes develop might mean more hurricanes. Or it might not, if the winds aren’t present when the hurricane forms. “There are other effects of global warming on hurricanes that we did not look at and that cannot be dismissed,” she said.  If there are factors they didn’t look at, how can they know whether they can or cannot be dismissed?

The second story was carried on the same website, ScienCentralNews, which ironically, has the slogan “Making Sense of Science,” but was written for Scientific American. It focuses on the ozone layer and winds, and the consequences of the winds, which scientists claim have been shifting because of man-made global warming – the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said so.

Because the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica has become smaller every summer since 1996, due, scientists say, to the banning of chemical refrigerants and propellants known as CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), it might just mean good news for healing climate change as well.

These scientists believe that global warming has shifted the winds toward the poles, causing an increase in the speed of the winds, which affects storms, ice, and the carbon uptake of the oceans. Repairing the ozone would weaken the winds, says Lorenzo Polvani, an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University and that would be good for slowing melting. But, he also thinks that Antarctica might experience warming sometime in the future because, if there were no hole in the ozone, even more greenhouse gas concentrations would be trapped, potentially speeding the melting of ice shelves. I guess we can’t win.

Judith Perlwitz of the University of Colorado at Boulder concurs with Polvani. An atmospheric scientist, she did have the good sense to add that none of the models on which they have based their predictions can possibly tell the whole story, because they don’t include all possible variables in their calculations. Specifically, she says, no one factored in the role the ocean and its currents play when it comes to regulation of the Earth’s temperatures.

Since the oceans cover the majority of the Earth's surface, that's a rather large omission. So what good are any of these now apparently speculative conclusions? 
 

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