Wandering Magnetic Poles and Wild Weather

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The eye-popping connection between the planet's weather and its magnetic field has caught hold among scaremongers recently, ever since scientists described the potential of devastating "superstorms" -- storms caused, scientists say, by flowing gushers of water in the sky known as atmospheric rivers. Some worriers say that these tubocharged tsunamis will soon be widespread, thanks to the increased movement of the Earth's magnetic field.

And that when the field shifts, the story goes, anything can happen. All hell will break loose, they say, arguing that the shift has a greater effect on the world's weather than even the carbon-based influences scientists have been carefully monitoring.

Poppycock, say the best scientific minds in the Northern Hemisphere.

"Trying to link all of these things together is kind of preposterous," said Dr. Carol Raymond, principal scientist and a geophysicist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, which operates a fleet of satellites that closely monitor the planet and leads the charge in Earth Science research

The website for Canada's national earth science arm also draws no conclusions whatsoever between the fields and the weather. Nor does Russia's magnetic pole watchers at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics in frosty Siberia.

In fact, there's simply no established scientific connection between the concept of superstorms -- and weather in general -- and the Earth's magnetic fields, agreed the scientists FoxNews.com spoke with. And don't let the aurora borealis fool you.

The beautiful and ghostly phenomenon seen in Northern climates is in fact connected to the magnetic fields, Raymond explained, adding yet another cosmic phenomenon to the mixing pot: She said that the sun's particles, carried by the solar wind pouring off the sun, are closely linked to the earth's magnetic field.

"The earth's magnetic field is the mediator of those particles -- it's basically a shield protecting the Earth from the solar wind, the source of these particles." And that interaction causes events such as the aurora borealis -- an ionospheric event, in the outer atmosphere, she's quick to point out, not something that happens in the inner atmosphere, where our weather occurs.

"There's been research over the past few decades trying to isolate a clear cause and effect relationship between charged particles entering the Earth's atmosphere and the weather," Raymond said. But nothing has been proven.

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