Sometimes I go wandering off into Never-Never Land.
On the trip from Ct to Calif, after Thanksgiving in '25, I sat by the window, and at one point, there was fairly complete cloud cover. EXCEPT for 3 black dots which seemed to be holes in the cloud cover. That's .... unusual. Some background. When you're out on a clear day, and there are a few small white puffy clouds, here and there, each one of those is at the top of a thermal, where relatively warm air is rising. As the air rises, it gets less dense, and cools, and eventually the humidity condenses into those clouds. When you're hang gliding, heading for the thermal, under such a cloud, is a good place to be to gain altitude.
When you're flying a commercial jet, and it bounces, you just went through a, probably much larger, thermal. (Walmart's biggest parking lot ???)
Back to the black dots, or holes. It seems to me that, at those locations in the clouds, air was sinking, and the clouds were evaporating, as the air sank and became more dense, and the relative humidity decreased. After we landed, I asked the pilot, who said that he hadn't seen it, and couldn't remember seeing anything like it. We've flown that route many times, and this was the first time I ever saw it. One might ask, "Why was the air there sinking?" I don't know. I don't even have a good speculation, but I am reasonably sure that it was happening.
But where does that lead? Where have I ever seen anything like it? OH, the eye of a hurricane. Always quite clear. Every time. Ah-hah. Upper air is sinking in the eye of a hurricane and the clouds evaporate. Why? I don't know, but if I was to guess, the lower atmosphere rotation is sucking air down through the eye.
There's an axiom that says that if there are 2 explanations for anything, then the simpler one is true. If we consider gravity, it seems that Newton's explanation is more straightforward than Einstein's. There's another think to consider. 600 years ago, scientists of the day apparently though that, while most stars were fixed, there were spheres above the earth to which the planets were attached, and they rotated separately from "the sky". Once the galaxy was understood, it all made sense. equations showed where planets were, and even predicted the existence and location of planets that hadn't been found yet. This is, of course, way past my pay-grade, but it seems a bit strange to me that Newton was wrong, and yet all his equations were accurate.
Many times I've read that alligator remains have been found in arctic regions, so the arctic must have been much warmer. My problem with that idea is that if the arctic was that warm, what must it have been like around the equator? Wouldn't the more likely explanation involve plate tectonics, and that the area where that has been found, must have been much nearer to the equator when that alligator was alive.