Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from March, 2007

The Chilling Stars – Henrik Svensmark & Nigel Calder *****

Every once in a while you come across a book that really makes you think, because it presents a theory that’s a surprise, yet the more you read the text, the more it seems to make sense.  The Chilling Stars  is just such an book. In it, science journalist Calder and scientist Svensmark put forward a striking case for the argument that cosmic rays – high speed particles from outside the solar system – have a huge impact on our global temperature. At first sight this seems crazy, and Svensmark and his colleagues had to put up with a huge amount of resistance when they initially came up with their theory, but with time, many observations have raised the likeliness of this theory to something like that of dark matter – one that we aren’t certain of, but has a lot in its favour. The idea is that these high energy particles (or more precisely the secondary particles that are generated when the cosmic rays impact the atmosphere) act as triggers for cloud formation. When there are a lot o