Barry McMullin

War criminal, subject to ICC arrest warrant, Vladimir Putin, has thoughts on who should receive the Nobel peace prize... 🫠

MM refusing to do anything on climate shows that he puts disproportionate weight on the opinions of lobbyists for data centers, car manufacturers, dairy, etc cause support for government action on climate change actually unites people across the country..so who is he talking about?

Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado wins Nobel peace prize Opponent of Maduro regime receives award and praise for keeping ‘flame of democracy burning’

[To state the obvious: to the extent that the Gaza ceasefire is now attributable to Trump's intervention, then the unforgiveable delay until now is attributable to his previous active support of the genocide...]
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

Sadly, I think that "will be" is no longer future tense: it seems to me that serious division has already arrived, and is being actively stoked by those polluting industries. Political power (in IE) is variously either captured or sticking its collective head in the sand...

Our landmark book revealed the cost of inequality. Fifteen years later, things have only got worse | Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett Labour should be emboldened by the popularity of policies aimed at breaking down inequality, say authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

"... the real truth is that *we can’t afford* the super-rich." [Missed this when it came out last year: well worth a read, even knowing that #KierStarmerLabour chose a very, very, different road!] www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I'm not being pedantic (or at least, not intentionally!). I think it's a difference that makes a difference. That "real" framing - even with the conditional - gives credibility to the AI hype and deflects from what I'm suggesting as the much more "real" question...

I know. But the lede is still "The Real AI Question": and I'm suggesting that that speculative "what if" question is not at all the "real" question.

This is not what leadership looks like. Climate change is having serious impacts in the here and now. The effects for future generations will be devastating.

The challenge is immense. We need leaders who communicate honestly and bring the people with them. This isn't it.

Micheál Martin raises the white flag on achieving our climate targets 🏳️
A Government with no leadership, no ambition and no ideas.

bsky.app/profile/edzi...

It's only a "real" question *if* it really "does what is promised". So no, IMHO it's absolutely not "the real AI question". Much better, right now, to ask "who benefits from ungrounded AI hype?"

CLIMATEWIRE Climate critics try to discredit IPCC author for linking disasters to global warming By LESLEY CLARK, SARA SCHONHARDT, CHELSEA HARVEY | 10/09/2025 06:22 AM EDT Roger Pielke Jr. and oil industry supporters are attacking climate scientist Friederike Otto, whose work has been used in lawsuits against polluters.

Table 12.12 | Emergence of CIDs in different time periods, as assessed in this section. The colour contesponds to the confidence of the region with the highest confidence: white cells indicate where evidence is lacking or the signal is not present, leading to overal bu confidence of an emerging signal.

The attack on @frediotto.bsky.social was seeded years ago by Roger Pielke Jr, who started arguing that this table from a recent @ipcc.bsky.social report proved that climate science cannot attribute extreme weather to climate change.

But Roger is of course lying. And we know this for 2 reasons.

🧵

It is - among other things - an abject dereliction of duty on the part of an entire political generation. Blaming "the people" - when "the people" have never been seriously consulted - is a deflection, and a downright offensive one at that!

On the contrary: the narrative oscillates between denying that there are *any* burdens (all "sunny uplands", against all evidence!) or denying that any *specific* burden is "politically" tolerable (thus refusing constraints on data centre growth, aviation growth, dairy growth, SUV growth etc. etc.).

IMHO it would be fair to say that "democratic will" is heavily influenced by *fairness*. As long as "burdens" and "benefits" are clearly and overtly *shared* on a fair basis (differentiated responsibility, capacity and vulnerability) then most people will buy in. But no serious effort to do that!

E&E News by POLITICO Publications Subscription About Free Trial Login Search Full access to essential energy & environment news for professionals. Learn more 7-DAY UNLIMITED ACCESS FREE TRIAL Climatewire Climate critics try to discredit IPCC author for linking disasters to global warming By Lesley Clark, Sara Schonhardt, Chelsea Harvey | 10/09/2025 06:22 AM EDT Roger Pielke Jr. and oil industry supporters are attacking climate scientist Friederike Otto, whose work has been used in lawsuits against polluters. Friederike Otto. Fossil fuel industry allies have launched a campaign against the inclusion of scientist Friederike Otto in the next United Nations climate review. They say her work to attribute extreme weather to human-caused global warming is bolstering climate lawsuits against oil companies. The First/Facebook | The First/Facebook Critics of mainstream climate science and allies of the fossil fuel industry are taking aim at a prominent expert who’s helping coordinate the next United Nations review of global climate research, arguing that her work aims to bolster multibillion-dollar lawsuits against oil and gas companies. In an August New York Post op-ed, Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, raised concerns about the appointment of Friederike Otto as a coordinating lead author for the seventh assessment report of the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The criticism is aimed at extreme weather attribution, a popular field of research that studies whether and to what degree human-caused global warming has made an extreme weather event, such as a heat wave or heavy rain, more severe or likely to occur. Otto co-founded World Weather Attribution, which develops analyses showing climate’s role in extreme weather events. Advertisement Attribution science has been cited in congressional hearings and included in legislation to highlight the links between extreme weather event…

UN Abandons Science and Hires Climate Change Zealots Who Damn the Facts By Roger Pielke Jr. New York Post August 22, 2025 Life would be impossible without experts — doctors help us when we get sick, mechanics fix our cars when they break down, farmers produce our food, to name just a few. But we live in a time when too many of these roles have become politicized. President Trump recently fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the agency released a jobs report he did not like. Similarly, soon after his election, President Joe Biden fired the climate scientist leading the US National Climate Assessment and replaced her with a communications professional. Not surprisingly, public confidence in medical and scientific institutions has dropped overall and become more partisan as politicians increasingly select experts to advise them based on their politics rather than their willingness to call things as they see them. The ongoing politicization of scientific institutions is not limited to politicians or to the United States. Now we’re seeing it in the organization tasked with periodically assessing climate science under the United Nations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which distills the thousands and thousands of research papers on climate change to help inform decision-makers on the nature of the problem and possibilities for response. The IPCC is so important for clarifying what we know and don’t know about climate that I have testified before Congress that if it didn’t exist, we would have to invent it. Last week, the IPCC announced its list of authors for its seventh assessment report, which is just getting underway and will take several years to produce. One of its most important chapters is on extreme weather events — how they may have changed over time, and understanding the reasons for any identified changes.

Roger Pielke Jr spent years moaning about being "cancelled", and now he's just spending his days at a fossil-funded think tank directly attacking climate scientists, and he has a fascist dictatorship to help him out now too

So seriously gross

www.eenews.net/articles/cli...

Anti-protest proposals put free speech at risk | Letters Letters: Readers respond to the proposal to give police further powers to curb ‘cumulative’ protests, in response to actions by the proscribed group Palestine Action

“It was the 89th anniversary of the arrest of my father for being one of the organisers of the 1936 Cable Street resistance to the rise of fascism in Britain.

I was arrested on Saturday with hundreds of others at the Defend Our Juries action…”

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

All I want in life is to persuade everyone, when encountering politics & culture, to ask, "why are we talking about this?" I mean that very literally: anything you encounter on your screens reflects a choice. Someone covered that, talked about that, rather than the many other things out there. Why?

That issue sure seems carefully & deliberately chosen to activate a certain set of reactions, doesn't it? Seems designed to take even people with generally tolerant, egalitarian instincts & push them in the direction of judgment & exclusion. Sure seems carefully chosen, doesn't it!

So everyone's *first* question should have been, "why are we talking about this?" Why not other political issues that affect more people? Why not other *trans* issues that affect more people? Why not other *HS sports* issues that affect more people? Why this very particular, specific, rare thing?

A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size Anthropic research on data-poisoning attacks in large language models

oh great, a small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

The council are flying the national flag at half mast today to mark that it is 10 years today that ten of our neighbours in Carrickmines lost their life in a fire at their homes.

Go raibh suaimhneas síoraí dá n-anam.

... And let the most decorated surviving USAian WWII European theatre veteran receive the award in Oslo. Fly his girlfriend there too !

The group is Genspect, the designated hate group co-founded by Irish media fave Stella O’Malley

Climate laggardism back in fashion then...

Doug's determined face above this headline: "Coach firm to pay thousands to accessible transport activist after driver lied that he threatened violence"

TOP TIP: don't try to defame my "relentless but not vexatious" (the ORR's words, not mine) friend Doug Paulley when you've completely failed in your duties to provide at least an attempt at an accessible travel experience. He'll win.
www.disabilitynewsservice.com/coach-firm-t...

Headline from an article in Nature this week that states "Prizes must recognize machine contributions to discovery. The future of science will be written by humans and machines together. Awards should reflect that reality."

Lol the Nobels can't even acknowledge women's contribution to discovery. But sure let's acknowledge The Machines.

This is a good corrective to the BS narrative flowing through the Pielke/AEI/NYP/EID/DOE nexus. Their argument is designed so that we can never ever attribute extreme events to emissions - even singular events that would have *never* [for some suitable finite approximation] have happened before.

A lot of the polarising that has happened is because of politicians like Martin pretending that difficult choices don't exist, and when the consequences arrive people get angry.

So bloody useless