UPDATE: The 2025-2026 list of faculty and postdoc positions in ecology and evolutionary biology is out! Be sure to check out this active and helpful community run resources! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Listening to a lot of talk about impact and pulling engagement at a nesting this week and I'm becoming convinced we can't solve the climate crisis from within the system. Something more fundamental has to change.

Yep, it was the norm to get cat-called when passing building sites when I was a teen in late 90s/early 2000s Bucharest

I wrote a book called "Stories Are Weapons" which is a history of psychological war in the United States. In it, I describe how the US military came to a simple definition of rhetoric used for destructive purposes in war (so-called psyops) vs. for democratic debate. Want to know what it is? (1/3)

You get higher uncertainty in regions where there's no data abd to fix that you need to change your cost function? People doing Earth System data assimilation could've told you that 15 years ago

North Cork Creameries is a member of Bord Bia's 'Origin Green' greenwashing programme despite 125 non-compliance notices since 2020 and listing on the EPA's top polluter watchlist 🙈 www.irishtimes.com/environment/...

Recalling this bit of history — When the shooting of a German diplomat in 1938 was used by the Nazis as a pretext for Kristallnacht. Individual violence doesn’t justify state bigotry and oppression, ever. www.history.com/articles/kri...

Surprisingly hard to find this information but the sett;emtns refers only to books that have an ISBN and have registered copyright in the US. So this could cover science books, do check! 🧪 #academia authorsguild.org/news/what-au...

Does anyone know if papers in LibGen count too? Looks like they scraped all Copernicus journals which are published under creative commons

@dcuclimate.bsky.social is running a 6-part online Climate Change Media Masterclass this autumn, helping journalists and media pros strengthen coverage of science, policy, & sustainability. Starts late Sept. www.dcu.ie/climate/dcu-...

Re some discourse I'm seeing around Bluesky shrinking, apparently 'don't be a dick' and 'add alt text' is considered gatekeeping now

Come for the defence, stay for the nature

I 100% agree with the principle of considering tradeoffs of carbon sequestration but I wish there was a more detailed explanation and validation of the machine learning model used. Would be good to see similar estimates from process models and see how they compare too www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

GenAI has made many things about spam job applications worse, but the one constant of these emails, whether written by humans or machines is 'Dear Sir'.

Ahoy there researchers. I just checked the ‘libgen’ database used by Anthropic and found the full text of 95 of my scientific papers and one book. It’s super easy to add your details to this class action so you can join with other creative primates whose copyrighted work was taken without consent.

Climate good news, read these ones too!

Hey Folks...You may start seeing social media sites and a website for Climate.us If you see it, follow and share. It is legit and has some amazing, credible people behind it trying to plug leaks in the climate science world. Trust me on this one. More is coming....

AI slop websites are churning out climate science denial, using made up research from fake experts. MSN, the world’s 4th-largest news aggregator, published some of these articles to millions before they were pulled. Learn more via @desmog.com buff.ly/SXgQ4Ig

Imagine if the Green Party got a front page headline every day to warn that climate change is ultimately bad news or the Lib dems got one to point out the long term crisis in social care funding

I'm in this picture and I don't like it

Perhaps for Haber we can do a net lives saved comparison?

Baby steps but still kinda proud of Trinity for continuing to not mow the lawns. It's all looking a little dry though - it's been a weird summer, high moisture but low rain

This is a good reminder that *wholesale* electricity prices often bear little resemblance to the prices human beings actually pay (and sometimes even notice and remember). While Irish wholesale prices have dropped 74% since their 2022 peak, residential retail prices have *gone up ~10%* since then.

This is a small but significant step forward - an open call for Max Planck directors, where candidates were previously hand-picked behind closed doors. Still not exactly a real job ad and selection. #academia

We ship 11 billion tonnes of stuff around the world and 40% of that is fossil fuels.

Me: I'm going on a business trip, need to book a hotel My friends: oooh, splash out Me: Look, I'm on a university budget it's not going to be a great hotel My friends: but universities make so much money out of student fees! Me: how much time do you have?

Sign AGU’s letter to defend climate science. 
The Trump administration has proposed overturning the EPA’s endangerment finding — the science-based determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health.

There's someone in the academic registry office who can't distinguish between me and the student I'm emailing about and uses our names interchangeably. I can't decide if it's incompetence or AI. Probably incompetence.

Our group's contribution to the #1pRPGjam this year is Spider!, a zillennial horror story. Will you survive the monster in your vacation rental? Will you fall out with that one friend who's constantly on insta? Will you get your deposit back? naths-creative-corner.itch.io/spider-the-rpg

Basically, because everyone looks at infrastructure with the question "how does this most impact Me, the protagonist of reality?" - the focus of MetroLink discourse by billionaires and yak-yak columnists has been purely on Dublin Airport. A good shift away from that here 🔽

Perhaps one of the takeaways is that media should stop hyping up preprints. The peer review process isn't perfect but it does catch some things like this

If you’re a #TTRPG creator with a Patreon page, please do this survey and state that you’re opposed to the use of AI! We need to nip this in the bud ASAP. The survey takes 2 minutes and will hopefully have a big impact if enough of us submit strongly negative opinions!

In response to the below thread people have pointed me to other similar "geospatial foundation models". To what now, you ask? I decided I had nothing better to do this sunny Friday afternoon than to look into it.

I'm trying to explore Google DeepMind's AlphaEarth. It seems like it has a lot of potential, previous models from them, like AlphaFold rocked their scientific fields so what can this one do for us? A thread of what I've managed to figure out. 🧪🌏

No amount of wishing or hoping for an imaginary carbon unicorn will make carbon markets work for the climate --- Op-ed by ActionAid Ireland's director Karol Balfe @actionaidie.bsky.social @karolbalfe.bsky.social www.irishtimes.com/environment/...

Our university's computing cluster is down because of 'an issue with the cooling'. It was 26C in Dublin yesterday. This does not bode well for the future.

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...

I feel somewhat justified în spending at least a third of my climate science course teaching about prediction uncertainty

Irish artists/ supporters of the arts, please check out and fill in this short survey. The Gript/ far right dudes are already sharing it on X and I'd be worried it'll get brigaded. If we want it to be retained and expanded we gotta drown them out.

LLMs don't lie. They also don't tell the truth. They're capable of neither, because they have no concepts of lying, truth-telling, understanding, morality, shame, or anything else. They have no *capacity* to conceive. They're just empirical models cleverly designed to look like process-based models.

Guess it's been trained on our imposter syndrome posts

In that one does not, in fact, want random academics hiding in one’s clothes. That is just weird and intrusive.

My thoughts are best summed up by a quote from one of the students on my climate course: Did you know there's carbon already in the ground? Why don't we just leave it there?

But I like thinking. It's my hobby.

I also think we can no longer say something is not feasible. They want to build a nuclear power plant on the moon. We can electrify trains.

Even if self driving cars at scale were a real possibility (they aren't) the last thing this city needs is more cars

These days, make sure you're really buying what you want to buy online. Also, if you see news that a favourite author has written something unexpected, unless that comes verifiably direct from them or their publisher, double and triple check that it isn't one of these increasingly prevalent frauds.

Important to remember we're always in internet bubbles. My feed has been full of discussions of LNG imports from the US to the EU for the last few days but I just mentioned it in a friend chat and everyone was like 'what's that?'

The pro biofuels arguments always baffle me

Once again for the people at the back, LLMs don't care or prefer anything, they're just a set of equations that some humans wrote. This whole mess is caused by AI companies and they could fix it if they wanted