I'm the poster of the article because this is from my dad's lab at UCLA. While I must profess great ignorance about much of what he does and this piece of research in particular, he has been telling me about this work for a while. Basically, he is a weather scientist, but instead of studying weather patterns that directly affect earth's surface (e.g. rain storms and tornadoes), he studies the weather in earth's upper atmosphere, and specifically in the magnetosphere where earth's atmosphere interacts with the solar wind. His primary focus is to understand the dynamics and triggers of weather storms there, called magnetospheric substorms -- which, besides from causing some havoc with satellites and communications, also cause the aurora, or northern lights. While this has nothing to do with global warming, it is quite interesting as his group discovered that there is a much larger influx of energy into the magnetosphere than was previously thought. For all those here with space/physics/weather/atmosphere interests, I thought it would be of interest. As previously noted, this is solid basic research that furthers our understanding of how our planet works at the interface with space.

Although it is quite amusing as you wrote it, I think you meant hadrons.