Droughtflation 'is eroding resilience' Climate breakdown is driving drought, impacting farmers - and increasing the cost of food during a cost of living crisis.

Depleted soils, dry seasons and bad harvests are driving up the cost of basic foodstuffs

Creative UK is thrilled to be a partner for Climate Creatives 2025, brought to you by BBC Academy Live on 7 October 🌍

The virtual conference will explore the power of climate storytelling within the creative sector!

Register: www.bbc.co.uk/academy/live...

#ClimatesCreatives

Racism isn’t innate – here are five psychological stages that may lead to it There is no genetic or biological basis for dividing the human race into distinct “races.”

There is no genetic or biological basis for dividing the human race into distinct “races.”

Fun fact: we devote ten times more space to golf courses in England than we do to allotments (source: OS Greenspace data) www.independent.co.uk/climate-chan...

bsky.app/profile/josi...

My new history of romanticism shows how enslavement shaped European culture Romanticism centred on the idealisation of human freedom in all its forms.

Romanticism centred on the idealisation of human freedom in all its forms.

www.rspb.org.uk/whats-happen...? 💚 @rspb.bsky.social

Zia Yusuf Wants to be the UK’s Elon Musk Reform UK leader and figurehead Nigel Farage hasn’t been alone in basking in the media spotlight of late. Farage has been accompanied by his party chair, Zia Yusuf, a multi-millionaire tech entreprene...

🔴 NEW 🔴

Zia Yusuf Wants to be the UK’s Elon Musk

The Reform chair has long expressed his admiration for the DOGE chief, and is now trying to replicate his policies in local government.

📝 @rtakver.bsky.social
www.desmog.com/2025/05/08/z...

Rooftop solar can be torn out of capital’s hands Decentralised solar has the potential to support co-operative, municipal and other forms of community ownership and control.

Thanks @theecologist.org for using my piece about rooftop solar being "well suited to community, co-operative and municipal forms of ownership that have lengthy precedents associated with the labour movement & with socialist visions of post-capitalist economies" theecologist.org/2025/may/07/...

Perfect storm of tech bros, foreign interference and disinformation is an urgent threat to press freedom Political attacks are now supercharged by technology platforms retreating from accountability, and exploited by hostile foreign powers.

Political attacks are now supercharged by technology platforms retreating from accountability, and exploited by hostile foreign powers.

Robert Macfarlane’s new book is a plea to feel the pulse of our rivers Robert Macfarlane’s new book asks a simple question that poses a profound challenge to environmental policy and the drive for economic growth.

Robert Macfarlane’s new book asks a simple question that poses a profound challenge to environmental policy and the drive for economic growth.

Ground breaking conference launches a fightback against racism in the UK by uniting diverse groups from the police, NHS and education Lawrence Davies at a previous rally Last week I attended a conference which aims to unite diverse groups fighting racism to form a national campaign to stop the rising tide of prejudice, harassment…

ground breaking conference launches fi9ght against racism in the police,NHS and education
davidhencke.com/2025/04/30/g...

Second episode of The Fireside Carbon Chat is now online at: www.cemus.uu.se/fcc-ep-1-202... - both as a podcast & YouTube.

This was a Q&A session, covering diverse issues, from BECCS to marginalised global south researchers; Canadian politics to British Steel & climate curriculums to Net Zero.

Here’s the first instalment of our "Fireside Carbon Chat" series, hosted by @cemusuppsala.bsky.social and available as both a podcast & on YouTube: www.cemus.uu.se/fireside/

We borrowed the "Fireside" concept to reflect our goal of fostering informal, candid conversations on climate-related issues.

How Trump's Greed, Grift and Racism Are Collapsing America's Democratic Experiment Historian Heather Cox Richardson joins The Left Hook to discuss how the Trump Administration reflects America's tradition of the aristocracy abusing capitalism and racism to exploit the masses.

We had 33K people tune in to this conversation. Here it is for people who couldn't catch it live.

"Rebellions are built on hope."

With @hcrichardson.bsky.social

How Trump's Greed, Grift, and Racism Are Collapsing America's Democratic Experiment

open.substack.com/pub/thelefth...

Denis O.Denis O. • Following • Following Fintech Professional | ML & Real Time Data | AWS, Azure, GCP | LLM, NLP & Knowledge Graphs | Cloud Native & AI Solution Architect | Kafka, KubernetesFintech Professional | ML & Real Time Data | AWS, Azure, GCP | LLM, NLP & Knowledge Graphs | Cloud Native & AI Solution Architect | Kafka, Kubernetes 2d • Edited • 2 days ago • Edited • Visible to anyone on or off LinkedIn The Hallucination Industrial Complex.. We are not building intelligence.. We are productionalizing hallucinations at scale. An entire ecosystem now exists to normalize, monetize, and accelerate statistical probability guesswork disguised as cognition. It is not a feature. It is not emergence. It is a stochastic drift, wrapped in APIs and framed with words like autonomy, agentic reasoning, synthetic understanding and all the other bs.. At the core is a transformer design built for translation. Not logic. Not reasoning. Not truth. Just pattern alignment using attention, dot products, and token vectors. The original goal was mapping language to language, not thought to insight. But somewhere along the way, we scaled a statistical hack with loose variance into a cultural phenomenon. We now see models generating plausible garbage, confidently wrong answers, and erratic behavior as standard. This is not surprising. It is the natural consequence of how these systems operate. Fluency wins over factuality. High probability token chains dominate over epistemic grounding. This is not a malfunction. It is built in. Rather than fix this, we have built a supply chain around it. Research labs chase bigger models. Startups wrap prompts around prompts. Enterprises deploy hallucination wrappers as productivity tools. New protocols like MCP offer clean JSON interfaces for structured bullshit. The illusion is now modular and scalable. The industry rewards this illusion. Hallucinated coherence gets published. Fake reasoning gets praised. VC capital flows to whoever wraps …

Rather than fix this, we have built a supply chain around it. Research labs chase bigger models. Startups wrap prompts around prompts. Enterprises deploy hallucination wrappers as productivity tools. New protocols like MCP offer clean JSON interfaces for structured bullshit. The illusion is now modular and scalable. The industry rewards this illusion. Hallucinated coherence gets published. Fake reasoning gets praised. VC capital flows to whoever wraps the guesswork best. No one gets funded for saying the model lacks understanding. No one gets hired for saying scale has hit the wall. Entire careers are now built on refining the output of a broken premise. This is the Hallucination Industrial Complex. It feeds on attention. It profits from delusion. It builds polished demos that mask fundamental fragility. It creates layers of abstraction to distance users from the underlying instability. And now it is being normalized at every level of enterprise adoption. We are not in an age of AI driven transformation. We are in an age of AI enabled hallucination. And we are shipping it into critical systems. Legal tools. Healthcare workflows. Education platforms. Every layer of the knowledge economy is being interfaced with a system that still cannot say I do not know. There is no autoregressive chain that leads to understanding. There is no stochastic decoder that produces wisdom. There is no scale that will make a statistical approximation think, or become conscious.. We are drifting deeper into the illusion.. Faster. With trillions in funding. With all the media induced fanfare. This is not progress. This is entropy in sheeps clothing.. Welcome to the brave new world of the hallucination economy..

Happens rarely but I found a LinkedIn post that's worth sharing

www.linkedin.com/posts/denis-...

Bubble Trouble An AI bubble threatens Silicon Valley, and all of us.

I'm halfway through this article & like (and agree with) the points made thus far.

But I want to have an aside on how people uncritically use the term "foundation models" & "reasoning," when it is very likely that the models memorized all these benchmarks. 🧵

prospect.org/power/2025-0...

Rivers need champions to defend their rights in court Rivers are increasingly being given legal rights. Now they need people who will defend these rights in court

#Lewes in #Sussex has is set in a stunning river valley and downland environment and has a proud history of nature restoration. Now the #LewesDistrictCouncil has broken new ground by supporting a charter to provide the River Ouse with its own legal rights
sussexbylines.co.uk/news/environ...

Amazon Dime: Selling the climate short with carbon credits - Carbon Market Watch Tech giant Amazon now sells carbon credits to its corporate customers. While this offers companies a low-cost way to appear to be taking climate action, it does nothing to cut their real-world emissio...

Amazon's push to rebrand and resell the old and very, very busted model of carbon offsetting is pretty bad - this @carbonmarketwatch.bsky.social piece is a nice run down of how it all works

carbonmarketwatch.org/2025/04/03/a...

Have you paused to listen? Chiffchaffs calling, Blackbirds in full song, and the first Swallows on the wing.

Which spring sound always makes you smile? 🎵

#ThoughtfulThursday

Don’t rush out & mow you lawn… instead enjoy your beautiful long grass filled with wildflowers … and wildlife will thank you for leaving an important habitat undisturbed!

Ancient hornbeam tree in Mid Sussex, with late afternoon light shining through summer foliage

Here’s Mama Hornbeam, she’s seen a thing or two, you won’t stay Mondayised for long.

Trump team ‘survey’ sent to overseas researchers prompts foreign interference fears The document asks US-funded scientists in Australia, the UK and the EU to declare links to China or projects on diversity, equity and inclusion.

Anti DEI attacks coming to UK as well from US

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

March 20, 2025 It seems as if the Trump administration is rushing to tear apart as much as it can as opponents of its wholesale destruction of the United States government organize to stop them.

March 20, 2025

Kemi Badenoch Ditches Net Zero Target After Taking Donations From Funders of Tufton Street Climate Denial Group The Conservative leader and her Shadow Net Zero Secretary took funding from key backers of lobby groups campaigning to curb action against climate change

Was just on @lbc.co.uk talking to @mrjamesob.bsky.social about how Kemi Badenoch ditched her support for Net Zero after she and her Shadow Cabinet received multiple donations from individuals funding and chairing anti Net Zero lobby groups bylinetimes.com/2025/03/18/k...

World Rewilding Day 2025 | #RewildingTogether | Rewilding Europe Join our celebration of World Rewilding Day on March 20th, raising awareness of the benefits of wilder nature for wildlife, people and planet.

There's a great series of events, many online, being run by Rewilding Europe across the continent to mark World Rewilding Day next Thursday, March 20th

rewildingeurope.com/world-rewild...

The closure of Mauna Loa will cause irreversible harm to the scientific record and our understanding of our impact on the atmosphere. But the symbolism feels even more massive than that.

March 12, 2025 Trump’s 25% tariffs on all aluminum and steel imported into the U.S.

March 12, 2025:

10 unique community-led conservation solutions in the face of environmental despair Numerous events and policy decisions across the world in the last several months are causing despair among many environmentalists. The abrupt freeze, and potential termination, of international funds ...

Recent events and policy decisions across the world are worrying conservationists and climate researchers.

Here, Mongabay lists out ten unique community-led initiatives across the world that show positive and proven impacts.

news.mongabay.com/2025/03/10-u...

Censor, purge, defund: how Trump following the authoritarian playbook on science and universities I have mapped 35 of the Trump administration's attacks on science and universities to the authoritarian playbook - and consider what it means for attacks still to come

My latest post is now out.

I show how Trump's attacks on science and universities are neither random nor new - they fit very precisely into the authoritarian playbook.

This means we can guess what might come next and prepare - and we must!

christinapagel.substack.com/p/censor-pur...

Did u know? It's been lovely to see the sun the last few days, but don't start clearing away your seed heads, dead leaves & hollow stems yet. Millions of small souls are still bedded down.Wait until it's warm enough for long enough so that tiny beings are moving around in a more continuous way.🌿🌱🪲🐙🌍