So you really believe that increased winds will make all flights longer, because planes only ever fly in one direction?
It all depends upon where you're going and where your starting point is located, as well as what directions the winds are blowing, and how likely there are to be things like wind shear in your flight path.
Well, suppose you were trying to go around the world in 80 days. Winds would help with that. But sadly, wind speeds have declined as the planet warmed up, contrary to some simple notions that more energy equals faster winds. Scientists are still struggling with it, wondering if higher temperatures creates more eddy currents that slow things down by adding friction losses. I suspect there's some simple way of looking at a simple heat engine that would explain it. Let me explain: You have two atmospheres whose winds are driven by a 100 W/m^2 temperature difference between the equator and some temperate region. The kinetic energy of molecules (and thus the energy to be transported) is linear with T, so that produces some linear delta T in the atmosphere. That delta T causes a change in density because it causes a change in volume according to PV=nRT (which is actually an invalid equation in a planetary atmosphere, oddly enough, because any sample of a gas in a planet's gravity well can't have the same pressure at the top and the bottom, so there has to be a range of pressures, just like a water column, not just the one pressure). The pressure can't change much except though motion (dynamic pressure) and pushing air upwards into the stratosphere like a small mountain, as pressure is almost purely a function of the mass of atmosphere in a column and the gravitational attraction of the planet. It's basically pressure = mass * gravity / surface area, with some minor tweaks because the density varies with height, as does gravity. So the energy difference produces a linear (or very close to it) temperature difference that primarily manifests as a change in volume of a gas, and that change in volume pushes up and out, both driving winds, just as in a naturally circulating heat engine such as you might use in a nuclear reactor, with gas flowing from a hot source to a cold sink and returning, due to a corresponding change in density, since the number of moles is constant. Changes in temperature really aren't driving the process so much as the temperature induced changes in volume and thus density, which are acted on in an accelerating reference frame to produce forces that drive the circulation. So we have a fixed delta T to contend with, determined by radiation physics and planetary geometry, since delta T is proportional to internal energy of the gas. But again looking at PV=nRT, or rather V0 = nRT0/P and V1 = nR(T0+dT)/P, the ratio of V1/V0 is a function of the ratio of (T0+dT)/T0. But since dT is fixed externally, the ratio of V1/v0 gets larger as T0 gets smaller. For an ideal gas (which doesn't exist), a fixed delta T produces an infinite change in the density as temperature approaches absolute zero. As temperature approaches infinity, the fixed delta T produces a density change that likewise approaches zero. Big density changes produce high velocities because of high applied forces. Tiny density changes produce very low velocities because of low applied forces. This means that extremely hot atmospheres, like the surface of Venus, should have wind speeds that are about as fast as ocean currents. Those wind speeds should increase with altitude, where Venus' atmosphere is much colder. Extremely cold atmospheres, such as on Neptune, should have incredible wind speeds. The lower atmosphere of Earth should have low wind speeds, while the upper atmosphere should have high wind speeds due to its lower temperature. It means that hurricanes and tornadoes should be much worse during cold periods such as the little ice age, and slack off during hot periods. And indeed, all of that is the observed case. Yet it's still a mystery to climate scientists who are certain that more energy = more wind = more devastating storms. That's because most of them think like religious apocalyptics instead of scientists, reasoning like children who assume that our pollution is sin, and the wages of sin are bad, so what would "worse" look like? Bigger storms! Awesome devastation! Longer airline flights! They are out in the woods having religious epiphanies that are completely unconnected to reality or science.
The atmosphere is not a closed system. Higher water temperatures increase evaporation from the ocean's surface. As the air rises it cools, condensing water becomes rain. The energy has to go somewhere: wind.
You know I seriously never knew why the wind blows (or doesn't blow) until I was well out of High School. I knew where it blew and when but never why - and that I hate windy places.
Interestingly, as the water vapor condenses it forms clouds. In the tropics, the warmer the water is, the faster and bigger the clouds form, and the larger the resulting rain. This serves as a strong negative feedback system on an hourly basis, which creates an odd daily temperature pattern. The surface starts warming until 10 or 11 AM, and then the temperatures either flat-top or dip until later in the afternoon, when there's another post-rainfall peak, and then they start going down again. If the ocean temperatures are relatively cool, the noon-time dip is lessened, with less reduction in mid-day surface temps. The system acts as a temperature regulator. Meanwhile the 117 month major hurricane drought has continued, and NASA says that on average such 9 year droughts should occur only once every 177 years. They put our fortunes down to luck. NASA Giss paper
Getting back to the airline study, the "researcher" also based her study on the observation that the increase in travel time heading west, due to winds, is greater than the decrease in travel time heading east, so that overall the aircraft spend more time in the air. There are a couple of reasons for this, the first being math. At 500 mph it takes 60 minutes to fly 500 miles. With a 100 knot wind it would take 75 minutes to fly 500 miles west (60 min/hr * 500 miles/400 mph) but 50 minutes to fly 500 miles east (60*500m/600 mph). So it add 15 minutes to the west bound flight but only saves 10 minutes on the east bound flight, meaning the planes were in the air for an average of 5 extra minutes. Of course instead of doing a simple junior high math problem, she "analyzed" reams of flight data. She also skipped the part about asking a pilot why they fly the way they do. If she had, she'd know that they constantly compensate for wind by changing routes, and throttle back on the east bound runs to save fuel, since when winds are strong they'll meet their schedule with a lower airspeed while the wind keep their ground speed up. Occasionally they save so much fuel on a leg that they would exceed their maximum landing weight and have to burn it off with a long, low landing approach. Meanwhile, the west bound pilots take routes that try to avoid strong upper altitude winds. She then translates that extra time in the air into fuel burn as if a jet's fuel consumption is constant, which is wildly false. By her logic, driving at 55 mph burns far more fuel than driving at 75 mph because the car spends more time on the road. If airlines slowed their aircraft down we'd save lots and lots of fuel, but spend more time in the air. Flying slowly, regarding airspeed, is more efficient. If you build an aircraft that's slow enough a human can pedal it though the air. She got that part backwards, too, all because climate alarmism makes people stupid.
It's amazing. You really have me doubting whether you're telling a lie, or whether you really completely failed to understand the method and conclusions of this study.
The study's been studied. Aerospace engineers weighed in, laughing. An aircraft's fuel consumption is not a fixed rate. With stronger tail winds they throttle way back. Further, the effect of an almost immeasurable increase in wind speed pales in comparison to the selection of aircraft model. For example, a 737-MAX 7 gets 121 mpg per seat on a short haul trip, whereas a 737-700 gets only 86 mpg per seat on the same route. Secondly, she's naively assuming that wind speeds should increase due to global warming, while the measured data from weather stations around the world refute that conclusion. In the last 30 years, when we had peak temperatures, global wind speeds dropped 10 percent. Nature article about scientists trying to explain why wind speeds dropped, but noting that it will decrease output from wind farms. The drop occurred at altitude, too.
Professing analytic capability and an understanding of the referenced material when gliar only has willful ignorance to share would simply be another kind of lie. He's lying, one way or another.
So your understanding of the Nature article is that the wind speeds increased over the last 30 years?
So just what is your understanding of the Nature article, and what are the implications for wind speed?
Some winds in the northern hemisphere are slowing. On a very short term, it even looks as if most of them are. This is in few ways remotely related to the earlier study, and not at all related to the conclusions you drew. It doesn't mention anything about scientists weighing in on the earlier study, nor about air travel.
If 30 years is "a very short term" then how long does climate change take? Since the wind speeds are also slowing Australia and South America, perhaps the slowdown is affecting more than just selected areas of the Northern hemisphere. And must a study - in the field of science - only apply to topics that the scientists want it applied to, and only to support a particular political position, or are scientific findings somehow related to universal truths? Back in my day, data was data and its meaning wasn't limited to show only what someone wanted to show. If the wind speeds have dropped over the last 30 years as the climate has warmed, then the winds speed have dropped over the last 30 years as the climate has warmed. The paper I linked also shows that scientists are scratching their heads over it, suggesting things like tree growth. Here's another paper where planetary physicists are scratching their heads over why winds get faster on planets farther from the sun. So if wind speeds are inversely related to temperature on every planet we've observed, including our own (observationally), why do global warming alarmists insist that in the future winds will behave differently from in the past and the present of all planetary atmospheres yet observed by science? Oh, it's because we have angered God and he must punish us with damaging winds.
(1) Misleading about short/long term; unrelated. Different things happen at different speeds. (2) Misleading about "climate change", here falsely treated as a universal category. Different changes might well happen at different speeds. (3) deceitful about scope: Study does not address climate change. (4) deceitful about authority: Your argument rests on the paper's authority, but the paper warns this was measured over a very short term. False universalisation. False implication: Conclusion is completely unrelated to your quoted paper, the originally quoted paper, or any other claims in this discussion. Equivocation, using weasel words to indicate arbitrary restrictions on the one hand, examined objects as opposed to unexamined objects on the other. Utterly misleading; no-one has mentioned political positions in your paper, and you have completely failed to connect any of this to any kind of politics. Equivocation refigured as trap: Since scientific findings are always empirical, they are in fact never meaningfully indicative of any universal truth. Pointing that out defends truth, though your choice of words makes it seems as if it's an attack on truth. Possible additional groundwork laid for equivocation on "somehow related", which reads as "related in some meaningful way", but could verbatim be applied to any two real of fictional things you can think of, e.g. by virtue of you thinking of them. Summary of the above, but also projection: The only reason for your article to even be quoted in this thread is your attempt to make it show something it does not relate to at all, and that is unrelated to this thread. Tautology falsely implying a reduction in general wind speed, and a meaningful relation to temperature. Red herring. Fish market. (1) Ludicrous overgeneralisation; (2) continued attempt to imply relevance for unrelated claim by trapping us into discussing why said claim is false, when it is also not relevant. False presupposition. Too many to count, but note that the only empirical data you quoted says winds are changing, which would actually fit rather than not fit the nonsensical angry weather god model you're wrongly insinuating.
So winds have been slowing for 30 years, and the planet has been warming for 30 years, but 30 years isn't long enough to affect wind speeds, even though wind velocities respond at speeds we call "daily weather." So the climate can only change in ways that are allowed to be called climate change, even though increasing wind speeds are elsewhere treated as a result of climate change - unless they slow down due to climate change, in which case they're not "climate change" - wink wink. Because unless the author adds the tag word "climate change!" in a study about observed changes in climate, linking observed changes in climate to changes in climate is "deceitful." Yeah, only over 30 freakin' years at hundreds of stations on all continents except Antarctica (which has the world's highest wind speeds, btw, because it's so hot down there). Except the part of the paper that discussed wind speeds dropping in Australia, and data points showing it dropping in South America and the South Pacific. I guess "must" "study" and "science" are now weasel words? Back in my day they were the bedrocks of what we called "science", as opposed to wacko religious dogma that's making people stupid. ' Bingo! Warmists don't think science is in anyway connected to truth, which is why they stick with narratives about sin and greed and horrifying consequences as the gods become angry with us, inflicting brutal punishments like floods, droughts, hurricanes, mass animal migrations, mass extinctions, and mass starvation - all because temperature rose the same amount over a century as they did in the last 30 minutes. So winds speeds aren't related to temperature - unless they're increasing because of temperature, which will cause longer airline flights. But if wind speeds decrease then they can't be related to temperature - because that would be "science", and warmists won't touch real science with a stick. I'm the one citing scientists noting that contrary to accepted notions, wind speeds and temperature seem to vary inversely, with wind speeds on Neptune going supersonic. From a scientific standpoint, a scientist practicing science might not that repeated observations of nature reveal a certain pattern that seems to hold where ever they look. They would postulate in the same way that they did regarding the period of variable stars, and from that observation develop theories to explain it. Climate alarmists, on the other hand, insist that gas laws on our planet must produce different results than we observe on all the other planets, because our planet has a heart and its feelings can be hurt by meanies who drive big cars.
Gturner, you linkef to climate change. The scientists avoided it. Therefore, the strength of that link and whether it is even correct are on you to prove.
There are many papers that don't explicitly link temperature shifts to climate change, so by your logic that means temperature changes aren't linked to climate, either. For those of you who remain completely unfamiliar with science, when you collect and publish a bunch of measurements of some physical phenomenon, the meaning of that data is not under your control. The volunteers who went outside and dutifully recorded temperature data over the past century did NOT have climate change in mind, so by your logic that temperature data can't be used to show climate change. The motivations and goals of the scientists taking the measurements do not determine for ever and all time what those measurements might show, or how those measurements can be interpreted. What you are both doing is equivalent to declaring that theoretical physicists cannot advance new theories explaining observations that have the experimental physicists scratching their heads, because only the experimental scientists who published the results can use their actual, real-world observations to reach a conclusion or advance a new theory, and those recorded observations can only be used in ways specifically intended by the experimental scientists in their published paper. In short, under climate alarmists the entire process of science grinds to a halt because observations can only be used to support dogma. The observational data shows that wind speeds have dropped over the past 30 years. It doesn't matter why they were observing it, or for what purpose. The observation stands on its own.