Build Your Own Cosmic Ray Detector for £40 And Be The First On Your Block to Announce the Coming Global Cooling

If cosmic rays do have the effect on climate that several authors claim, then it might be nice to monitor them more closely.

An 18 year old Scottish schoolgirl has built her own cosmic ray detector for £40, and has been named the world's brightest young physicist for her work.

Holly Batchelor, 18, a pupil at the Mary Erskine School in Edinburgh, made her own cosmic ray detector - out of a plastic fish tank, an aluminium sheet and some felt - to win the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair's (ISEF) First Award for physics and astronomy.

Her cloud chamber device, which makes the particle trails of the rays visible, cost less than £40 to make - far cheaper than commercially available machines - and she hopes this will enable schools to build their own versions, inspiring more young scientists.

Holly also studied the energy and angle of cosmic rays, which come from the Sun and supernovae explosions.

This has recently become a hot topic, because it is thought the rays have an effect on cloud formation and climate change.

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Of course, all of this is happening at the same time as the important CLOUD experiment at CERN1 is preparing for its first results.

The collaboration comprises an interdisciplinary team from 18 institutes and 9 countries in Europe, the United States and Russia. It brings together atmospheric physicists, solar physicists, and cosmic ray and particle physicists to address a key question in the understanding of clouds and climate change. "The experiment has attracted the leading aerosol, cloud and solar-terrestrial physicists from Europe; Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom are especially strong in this area" says the CLOUD spokesperson, Jasper Kirkby of CERN. "CERN is a unique environment for this experiment. As well as our accelerators, we bring the specialist technologies, experimental techniques and experience in the integration of large, complex detectors that are required for CLOUD." An example in the present CLOUD prototype is the gas system, designed by CERN engineers, which produces ultra-pure air from the evaporation of liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen. "It's probably the cleanest air anywhere in the world", says Kirkby.

The first results from the CLOUD prototype are expected by the summer of 2007.

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Al Gore in his docuganda "An Inconvenient Truth", conveniently neglected to mention the cosmic ray hypothesis. But then, that is the whole purpose of docugandas, no?

Anyway, the whole reason for mentioning the inexpensive cosmic ray detector, is that we are inexorably approaching a significant slowdown in the solar conveyor belt. According to the theories explained by these climate books, the slowing of the conveyor belt is a harbinger of drastically reduced solar magnetic activity. This reduction of solar activity leaves the solar system wide open to extra-solar cosmic rays, which could trigger much increased cloud formation in earth's atmosphere. The resulting global cooling could very well make most rational people nostalgic for "global warming."

And of course it is "clouds" that are the glaring weakness in the greenhouse gas theory of CAGW--catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, according to MIT's cloud expert Richard Lindzen. In fact, there are no General Circulation Models (GCMs) that give credible modeling results for the effects of clouds on climate.