Dr Moira Nicolson

Ways to Give Your donation to Project Drawdown supports our core climate solutions work, allowing our team to be responsive to the rapidly changing climate landscape.

We have launched the Drawdown Explorer — the most comprehensive climate solutions platform ever created! It gives decision-makers the tools they need to act faster & more effectively than ever — & your support today can make this revolutionary tool even more powerful. https://drawdown.org/donate

Why?

Social media feeds today are optimized for engagement, often leading to misalignment between users' intentions and technology use.

In a new paper, we introduce Bonsai, a tool to create feeds based on stated preferences, rather than predicted engagement.

arxiv.org/abs/2509.10776

Manchester synagogue: PM praises rabbi and security staff who blocked attacker Two killed and four remain in hospital after a man, shot dead by police, carried out the attack.

Before the professional first responders arrive, there are 'zero responders', including amongst the survivors themselves, who respond to each others' needs

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

People who have more complex social identities view political identity as a less reliable source of information about others. Therefore they rely less on group-based stereotypes when judging outgroup members.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103125000915

In a new paper, we find that sycophantic #AI chatbots make people more extreme--operating like an echo chamber

Yet, people prefer sycophantic chatbots and see them as less biased

Only open-minded people prefer disagreeable chatbots: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Led by @steverathje.bsky.social

Totally agree although the academic literature also has its own blind spots and issues, publication bias being one well publicised problem. I often think there must be better ways than journals to make high quality knowledge more accessible (even if I agree that open access is a good place to start)

Yes! If we want people to listen to science, then don’t put it all behind a bloody paywall.

Groupthink – a monument to truthiness? | BPS Ramon J. Aldag re-examines a familiar concept.

'Groupthink' - a zombie idea in social and organizational psychology, from @bpsofficial.bsky.social @psychmag.bsky.social

(Yes there are drives to uncritical conformity in some groups, but that's because of particular group norms not some quality of being a group)

www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

Please spread this far and wide! I’m on the convening team of this exciting new IHR seminar series and we are looking forward to hearing about all the cutting-edge research being done by ECRs across the country!

Branching out: Are campuses an option for cities without universities? - Centre for Cities Branch campuses can bring a small amount of the benefits that universities bring, but may not be an option for places with struggling economies.

If cities cannot get their own university, how much effort should they put into getting a local branch campus? 🎓

@rjson.bsky.social explores in his latest blog👇
buff.ly/EpK0IPM

“In this case, there’s no reason not to credit both scientists, who made original discoveries independently. But Foote got there first. Had she been given the credit she was due at the time-& the institutional support to match-there’s no telling how far her work would have taken her.”

Eunice Foote

😊 Delighted to announce I'll be a Lead Author for ch.8 of @ipcc.bsky.social's Seventh Assessment Report, alongside 663 experts from 111 countries, as part of Working Group III.

Analysis by @carbonbrief.org shows increasing diversity of IPCC authorship: tinyurl.com/462pvby9

#IPCC #ClimateReport

We've found somewhere now...

Chart showing the more school a child misses, the greater the probability that they will experience mental ill health Source: Bespoke dataset created from Census 2021, NHS Hospital Episode Statistics and Emergency Care Dataset (April 2022 to March 2023), National Pupil Database (September 2021 to August 2022)

Nice bit of research we supported through a @britishacademy.bsky.social innovation fellowship. By linking census data with health & education administrative data the research shows absences from school significantly contribute to children experiencing mental ill health
www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...

Insurance in the Polycrisis | Kate Mackenzie & Tim Sahay The future is triage on an uninsurable earth.

We finally FINALLY finished the big insurance piece. There's a LOT that is not in there. But I think we've got a few of the important bits.
TL;DR insurance is extremely interesting, but it's neither the climate problem nor the solution.
www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/ins...

On the anniversary, what do the events of #9-11 tell us?

drury-sussex-the-crowd.blogspot.com/2011/09/what...

Extreme views are heavily over-represented on social media

Social platforms’ tendency to reward hostile content creates incentives that systematically reward simplistic messages and extreme positions and this fuels populism www.ft.com/content/9251... via @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

My blog on why Human Behaviour is the missing Piece in AI Safety

A bit of a comms special - looking forward to hearing from @moiranics.bsky.social and Holly on how they rolled out an AI tool to comms professionals in government, and @bensauer.net on how to be engaging!

Sign up to join us in person or online: luma.com/sm09nslz

These are — to understate - not screenshots from a paper saying "95 per cent of organisations are getting zero return from AI." Rather, this paper is wildly bullish for the frontier labs, indicating that 1. Al usage is already pervasive in enterprises everywhere 2. the lion's share of it is still accruing to them, despite the efforts of enterprises to keep their tools (and data!) in-house. ...And yet it somehow got reported as, to quote Axios, "an existential risk for a market that's overly tied to the Al narrative." See what I mean about feeling like a conspiracy theorist gleefully aware of the occult truth... just because you actually read the paper?

But you know what else reads freakishly fast, even faster than me, and is fantastically good at accurate summarization? That's right. GPT-5, and Claude, and Gemini. A very simple way to avoid being part of the credulous misled masses is this: whenever you read a story about a paper, run that paper and the story through a frontier model. Have it summarize the paper for you itself, and/or ask if the story has any howling errors or omissions. It's easy, just copy their two URLs into the ChatGPT interface and add your instructions. No, it will almost certainly not hallucinate. (Hallucinations usually come from models 'misremembering' their pretraining; here, the paper and report will be in their context window, which they're nowadays very good at recalling.) And the sad reality is that even in the unlikely event it does ... I am confident it will do so much less than, say, modern human reporters.

Why 95% of AI Commentary Fails https://aiascendant.com/p/why-95-of-ai-commentary-fails (so many good points here) #AI #journalism

Lots of my energy colleagues are sharing stories of how they’ve gone about getting their heat pump. This does two things: (1) it shows me that the experts think heat pumps are worth getting and (2) helps me understand how to go about getting one myself. Only works if you have these networks tho.

Great article. To this I would also add that scientists can help just by sharing what steps they’re taking in their personal lives to reduce their climate impact. As you say, scientists are trusted and other people are more likely to act if they’re given social cues from trusted sources.

How scientists can contribute to social movements and climate action Collective action on climate is crucial. Scientists play an important role in driving change.

Pleased to announce that @tristramwyatt.bsky.social & I have a new article out in @uk.theconversation.com, based on work with colleagues from @scientistsforxr.earth

We outline "How scientists can contribute to social movements and climate action"

Here's a thread with some background & key points 🧵

Portugal Fights Severe Wildfires – DW – 08/15/2025 Innovative prevention policies are being implemented in Portugal to combat devastating forest fires.

Very nice reporting on Portugal's leading role in adapting to more severe #wildfire seasons. Recommendation to watch (airing times in linked article) 🔥🌍🧪

text on black background THE BICYCLE DOESN'T HAVE TO BE FOR EVERY TRIP IN EVERY CIRCUMSTANCE FOR EVERY PERSON. YOU CAN USE IT AS NEEDED AND REPLACE THE CAR TRIPS THAT ARE DOABLE FOR YOU. ROVÉLO

Climate change could see more trees in cities to tackle heatwaves - BBC News Scientists say air temperatures could be reduced by 5C by planting more trees.

Simple but effective…

Plant trees to tackle deadly heatwaves, say experts

www.bbc.com/news/article...

My blog on why Human Behaviour is the missing Piece in AI Safety

Unlocking AI's Potential in Large Organisations

Insightful session from the Applied Data & Insight Team (Cabinet Office and Government Communications Office) on Unlocking #AI's Potential in Large Organisations with
@moiranics.bsky.social which took a practice-based approach, supported by online resources
👉 www.gov.uk/government/p...

Swiss village almost entirely destroyed after collapse of glacier buries it in mud One person missing and Blatten devastated after huge cloud of ice and rubble inundates evacuated town

My friend is in charge of the team that wrote the climate change adaptation plan for Switzerland and this is one of the things they expected.