1. Introduction: Cause and effect
Earth’s climate is in the midst of dramatic changes. These include the warming of the atmosphere and upper oceans, an increase in average sea level, the loss of mass in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets \cite{eds}3 and the acidification of the oceans. These changes have been more pervasive over the last four decades than they have been at any other time in the last several millennia, and they can be attributed to human activity with “virtual certainty” \cite{pp}4.
Not all shifts in global climatic indicators over that period are causes of global warming, however. In particular, the increase in atmospheric CO2 (\citet{Petit_1999}\citet{Steffen_2015})5,6 is typically described as one of the primary drivers of warming \citep{Hallett_2002}7. And while those increases are clearly tied to ongoing climate change, there are several indications that they are results, rather than the cause, of recent shifts in climatic conditions.
Rising CO2 levels could be a form of feedback from changes in global wind patterns and in the atmospheric circulation of water vapor. Those latter two factors—rather than CO2 increases themselves—may be responsible for climate change, and both of them could be affected by a common, and recent, shift in human activity. One factor that we regard as widely underestimated is the persistently increasing frequency of long-distance air travel in jet-propelled aircraft, whose jetwash creates long-lasting vortices that affect wind patterns and atmospheric circulation. For that reason, we submit that the vortices that compose the jet wash could be key contributors to anthropogenic climate change. That is the hypothesis introduced and defended in the present article.
The outline of the hypothesis is as follows. It is well established that large-scale vortices, such as those caused by solar wind or other major perturbations, affect global wind patterns \citep*{Keller_2002}8. Vortices of this kind, especially twinned and intertwined vortices that stretch for up to a thousand kilometers at a time, have been observed to collect particles from surrounding regions (\citet{Glassmeier_1992};\citet{Schunk_1994})9,10. This accumulation of particles offers a rich concentration of condensation nuclei that produces an accumulation of water vapor within and around the vortices. This is relevant to climate change because it disrupts the normal movement of water vapor caused by default patterns of atmospheric circulation, and atmospheric water vapor is well understood as a contributor to global warming \citep{Solomon_2010}11. Against this background of established findings, this article will substantiate the hypothesis, on the basis of several sources of evidence, that vortices from jet-propelled aircraft could magnify and modify the effects of existing atmospheric vortices and wind patterns leading to an acceleration of climate change. If left unchecked and uncorrected it is predicted that these never-ending strands of vortices may channel water out of the atmosphere into the universe thereby turning the Earth dry as the moon and Mars
2. Vortices and global atmospheric circulation