[Pseudoscience-is-malarkey (OP)]

Is one of the reasons why gas giants have such moody atmospheres is due to the fact they have a plethora of moons? Obviously they're so incredibly small in contrast to their host planet, but ... certainly they do pull on the giant planets a little bit?

[evan_au]

I'm not sure what you mean by "Moody".
- Jupiter has spectacular and continually changing swirls in its atmosphere
- While Uranus is pretty featureless
- I'm sure the difference has to do with temperature, chemistry and convection + Coriolis effect

...And are you saying that our atmosphere isn't moody?
The "Earthrise" photo taken from the Moon certainly put some mood into the environmental movement of the 1960s...
See: https://www.google.com/search?q=earthrise+apollo+8

[Pseudoscience-is-malarkey (OP)]

I'm not sure what you mean by "Moody".
- Jupiter has spectacular and continually changing swirls in its atmosphere
- While Uranus is pretty featureless
- I'm sure the difference has to do with temperature, chemistry and convection + Coriolis effect

...And are you saying that our atmosphere isn't moody?
The "Earthrise" photo taken from the Moon certainly put some mood into the environmental movement of the 1960s...
See: https://www.google.com/search?q=earthrise+apollo+8

Relatively speaking, they aren't. For example, the fastest wind ever recorded in a hurricane is 74 mph. The gas planets of our solar system have an average speed of 700 mph, and more than 1300 inside their anticyclonic storms. NASA says they have hard evidence that a lot of the discovered exo gas giants have around three times that number. And brown dwarfs... let's just say that our planet doesn't have winds at all.

[alancalverd]

Imagine a block of gas at the equator of Neptune. The planet is about 4 times the diameter of earth and rotates 1.5 times as fast, so the equatorial gases are rotating at around 6000 mph. At the poles, the gases are rotating at close to zero speed.

Now let that block drift "northward". The Coriolos effect gives it a speed over the surface of  6000/90 = 67 mph per degree, compared with around 11 mph/degree on earth. Earth winds (excluding tornadoes) have measured in excess of 200 mph, so a simple cyclonic wind of 1000 mph on Neptune (with a much smoother surface) wouldn't be much of a surprise.

[Pseudoscience-is-malarkey (OP)]

The Coriolos effect gives it a speed over the surface of  6000/90 = 67 mph per degree, compared with around 11 mph/degree on earth. Earth winds (excluding tornadoes) have measured in excess of 200 mph, so a simple cyclonic wind of 1000 mph on Neptune (with a much smoother surface) wouldn't be much of a surprise.

Gas giants don't have surfaces.

[alancalverd]

Jupiter and Saturn consist mostly of hydrogen and helium, with heavier elements making up between 3 and 13 percent of the mass.[3] They are thought to consist of an outer layer of molecular hydrogen surrounding a layer of liquid metallic hydrogen, with probably a molten rocky core.

Apologies for picking Neptune, which is now reclassified as an ice giant, for the calculation, but you get the picture, I'm sure.

The idea of a molten rocky core  surrounded by liquid is unremarkable  - we live on one, with a few bits of solid rock poking above the liquid.

Anyway, the "surface" is irrelevant except as an arbitrary  reference. The fact remains that equatorial air masses are moving, circumferentially, faster than polar air, so any mixing will produce a cyclone.