Cosmic rays are mostly protons, not electrons or positrons. You're mixing up to separate theories in the article.

Well, the primary particles that hit the atmosphere are mostly protons. They cause avalanche of secondaires that are varied but mostly muons,

As others have mentioned you are correct. But Earth's atmosphere has plenty of all forms of matter. A proton can interact with mostly anything and accelerate it. So you can find high energy everything in low earth orbit.

Much of the time they occur when two weather fronts of different temperatures collide with each other.

There’s a video of an EF5 tornado from the last 24-48 hours that shows continuous lightning in the background.

There hasn’t been an increase in background cosmic rays, so likely the mechanism for lightning generation is likely a continuum in different scenarios. Cosmic rays are one, but not all.

I tried to find this after reading your comment and the amount of nonsense AI tornado videos is a lot to wade through. Wasn't able to find it.

This was it on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildyinteresting/comments/1t7jlat/a...

Despite the title, the video shows a really strong mesocyclone as there is a break between the cloud and the ground. The funnel might be visible, but it’s not as big as the video makes you think.

This video was a repost btw, it's from 2025:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Enderlin_tornado#Tornado_...

Orrrrrr, there are always tons of cosmic rays of the type that create lightning hitting earth, there just aren't the conditions necessary for those rays to trigger lightning except for when there's a big storm. I imagine the clouds are a different electrical environment than a regular sky and maybe in those conditions a cosmic rays will trigger lightning. Like a gigantic bubble chamber made of our atmosphere.

Volcanic eruptions are also known to have lightning in the eruption plume.