Ninth Level Ireland

“Trinity still has shares worth at least €8 million in companies directly involved in fossil fuel activities, despite saying it would divest from such companies several years ago. In 2016, College announced it would divest from ‘companies whose primary business is in the extraction of fossil fuels’, in response to 15 months of campaigning by student activist group Fossil Free TCD …” (more)

[Jody Druce and Mairead Maguire, University Times, 11 August]

“Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Simon Harris and Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Eamon Ryan today (Monday, 7 June 2021) announced funding of €12 million for the second call of the Energy Efficiency and Decarbonisation Pathfinder Programme (EEDPP) for the higher education sector – a 50% increase on the first call last year …” (more)

[gov.ie, 7 June]

“Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) and Trinity Environmental Society have launched a petition urging candidates in the upcoming Provost elections to prioritise climate action during their term. The petition is calling on candidates to commit to a number of measures to increase the steps College is taking in the fight against climate change …” (more)

[Sárán Fogarty, University Times, 25 January]

“Individuals, businesses and governments alike have been aware for decades of the intense and widespread degradation that humans are causing to the environment through endless cycles of production, consumption and waste …” (more)

[Alix Pletcher, University Times, 12 January]

“Our universities stepped up in the fight against Covid-19 and now their vast potential should be harnessed to tackle the environmental challenge …” (more)

[Deirdre Lillis, Business Post, 19 August]

“The Government has today (Monday 9 March 2020) announced a €3 million pilot programme to improve energy efficiency and support decarbonisation in higher education institutions as part of targets in the Climate Action Plan. The programme is co-funded by the Department of Education and Skills and Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment (DCCAE) under Project Ireland 2040, and administered through the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) and Higher Education Authority (HEA) …” (more)

[Department of Education and Skills, 9 March]

“Sinn Féin’s Climate Action Spokesperson, Caoimhe Archibald MLA, has written to the senior management of Queen’s University Belfast and Ulster University seeking a commitment from both institutions to divest from fossil fuels. The East Derry MLA said …” (more)

[Sinn Féin, 10 March]

“The Government has today (Monday 9 March 2020) announced a €3 million pilot programme to improve energy efficiency and support decarbonisation in higher education institutions as part of targets in the Climate Action Plan. The programme is co-funded by the Department of Education and Skills and Department of Communications, Climate Action & Environment (DCCAE) under Project Ireland 2040, and administered through the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) and Higher Education Authority (HEA) …” (more)

[Department of Education and Skills, 9 March]

“The country’s largest university has announced a deal for students who miss classes to attend today’s climate strikes. In the deal stuck between authorities at University College Dublin and the Students Union, students will not be penalised for skipping classes where marks are normally awarded for attendance …” (more)

[Caroline O’Doherty, Independent, 20 September]

“A recent article on air travel in the journal Science has caused some turbulence in the academic community. In it, Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, calculated that she had travelled nearly 200,000 kilometres in 2017, mostly to attend conferences …” (more)

[Julie Talbot and Julien Arsenault, The Conversation, 3 September]

“Former president Mary Robinson has been appointed Adjunct Professor on Climate Justice in Trinity College. The President has taken up the role after resigning as Chancellor of the university at the start of June …” (more)

[Niamh Lynch, Independent, 12 July]

“President Michael D Higgins has called for students to be ‘equipped for the crisis we are in’ during the ‘struggle to mitigate climate change’ in a speech addressed to student organisations. The President made the statement at a garden party held in Áras an Uactaráin to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) and the 75th anniversary of Macra na Feirme, a youth organisation for people from rural Ireland …” (more)

[Finn Purdy, Trinity News, 24 June]

“Academic flying is often justified on the basis that international conferences and travel are important to the production of new knowledge. As such, travel brings researchers into contact with new ideas, allows them to share and refine their own ideas and therefore improves the quality of their research. However, in this post Seth Wynes argues that beyond a certain level there is no clear relationship between the amount of travel undertaken by academics and the quality of their research in terms of productivity and the production of high quality papers …” (more)

[LSE Impact Blog, 21 June]

“Citing the ecological damage caused by the frequent international flights made by academics, Jürgen Gerhards asks: do academics really need to travel so much? He then presents four simple changes that could be made to reduce the environmental impact of international academic travel …” (more)

[LSE Impact Blog, 25 February]

“In a year where climate change has reared its ugly head, Eva O’Hara investigates whether UCD is leading by example in creating a greener campus here on our patch of the world …” (more)

[Eva O Hara, University Observer, 13 October]

“… Mann first attracted the ire of those who question the scientific community’s conclusions about climate change due to his publication of what’s become known as the hockey stick graph. The graph showed that temperatures have swung up dramatically over the last century …” (more)

[John Timmer, Ars Technica, 22 July]

“The Irish Times have kindly published an article of mine on climate change today. Two apparently contradictory facts have recently become apparent that I thought worth discussing in my regular column on the IT Science Page …” (more)

[Antimatter, 30 May]

“Boris Johnson has become a real embarrassment to London’s scientific community after his latest outburst of climate change ‘scepticism’, which exposes not just a glaring weakness in his own knowledge but also within his team of advisers …” (more)

[Bob Ward, New Statesman, 23 January]

“A university in Liverpool did not have to disclose emails sent from a lecturer’s university email account concerning the lecturer’s work at a climate change policy think tank because the information could not be said to be ‘held’ by the institution, an Information Rights Tribunal has ruled …” (more)

[OUT-LAW, 21 December]

“The author of a controversial and now-retracted paper questioning the science of climate change has been reprimanded by his university for plagiarism …” (more)

[Retraction Watch, 24 February]