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Andrew Revkin 🌎 ✍🏼 🪕 ☮️ Profile picture
@Revkin
Jan 9 • 7 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X
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This 🧵is NOT for those in harm's way in the LA-area catastrophe. Find local advice and help. It is for those facing similar #wui fire risks elsewhere (this is not "wildfire"; it's an urban firestorm sparked by wildfire) and eager to stay safe. As you see the rush to explain the vast losses, look for the word #grandfathered. You won't see it much but it's vital. Here's why. 1/Image
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California has fine building codes for #wildfire risk reduction. osfm.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/cod…. But in most communities, huge numbers of homes and other buildings are exempt because they were built before the new codes went into force. That's where the word #grandfathered comes in. There are other issues. But I'm just focusing on those exemptions for the moment. 2/Image
The @CountyofLA "after action" report on the 2019 #woolseyfire that devastated Malibu lays this out.
3/ file.lacounty.gov/SDSInter/bos/s…Image
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Read the report and then, as the coverage flows forward from the current disaster, keep watch for "grandfathered" as assessments of the thousands of destroyed structures in the #palisadesfire #eatonfire #PasadenaFire and the rest are done in the weeks ahead. I'll be writing a #sustainwhat post on this drawing on insights from folks like @MichaelWWara @headecon and others. Get in touch if you have insights! 4/Image
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For resources on these issues explore @headecon ibhs.org/wildfire/wildf… and its CPAW project cpaw.headwaterseconomics.org @IBHS_org ibhs.org/wildfire/wildf… @FederalAlliance cpaw.headwaterseconomics.org 5/ Image
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Here's my initial post on this ongoing catastrophe #palisadesfire #emgtwitter 6/ revkin.substack.com/p/wild-fire-is…Image
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More from @Revkin

Andrew Revkin 🌎 ✍🏼 🪕 ☮️ Profile picture
Jun 5
Surreal but real report from @HannahAllam at @propublica recalls my '06 reporting showing that 24-year-old Bush appointee George Deutsch was trying to muffle @NASAGISS climate scientist @DrJamesEHansen. (Fugate Instagram reel). But the @DHSgov move is potentially way more consequential. (And don't miss the part where Team Trump has cut the CP3 office from 80 downt to 20 people.) 1/
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Here's the 2006 outcome: George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.

Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted. nytimes.com/2006/02/08/pol… 2/Image
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Subsequent 2007 hearing on Political Influence on Climate Change Research (don't count on any oversight this time around) c-span.org/program/house-…Image
Read 4 tweets
Andrew Revkin 🌎 ✍🏼 🪕 ☮️ Profile picture
Jun 3
☕ Case study in how to read coverage of new science on perennial issues (nutrition, climate change, pandemic, etc...) and avoid the #whiplasheffect.

Stick to the basics and avoid the media #singlestudysyndrome habit of snagging your attention with a new study (new science is almost *always* tentative). 🧵Image
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Example: That Cup of Coffee May Have a Longer-Term Perk / A new study of over 47,000 women found links between coffee drinking and healthy aging. Here’s what we know. by @alicegcallahan @nytimes
nytimes.com/2025/06/02/wel… 1. Not peer reviewed (peer review isn't a gold standard but is a valuable barometer). Of course, we journalists are in a bind. Embargoed press releases are dangled, papers are presented at meetings you're attending. Someone else will write it if you don't. Alice does a good job...Image
My 2008 @nytimes story on the #whiplasheffect in frontier science - and media coverage: When science is testing new ideas, the result is often a two-papers-forward-one-paper-back intellectual tussle among competing research teams. nytimes.com/2008/07/29/sci…

When the work touches on issues that worry the public, affect the economy or polarize politics, the news media and advocates of all stripes dive in. Under nonstop scrutiny, conflicting findings can make news coverage veer from one extreme to another, resulting in a kind of journalistic whiplash for the public.

This has been true for decades in health coverage. But lately the phenomenon has been glaringly apparent on the global warming beat.Image
Read 5 tweets
Andrew Revkin 🌎 ✍🏼 🪕 ☮️ Profile picture
Mar 19
Just learned from reliable source that a small but effective unit helping boost capacity for resilient development has been X-ed by Musk/Trump (and the university: @ccb_boulder at @INSTAAR at @CUBoulder. 1/ Image
The Consortium for Capacity Building (CCB) 2/ccb-boulder.org/about/
This work at the interface of climate / weather science and place-based behavioral / social science was always tough to sustain. Way back, when @MickeyGlantz was at @NCAR_Science, his job was X-ed. My coverage of that cut in 2008 helped get Mickey and his initiative moved to @CUBoulder. He was poised to retire at age 85, but many young researchers are now facing grim futures. gift link: nytimes.com/2008/08/07/sci… 3/3Image
Read 4 tweets
Andrew Revkin 🌎 ✍🏼 🪕 ☮️ Profile picture
Feb 12
Great to see #songwriter @jesse_welles get his @nytimes moment! Gift link below #fastfolk 1/
2/ Nice @DavidPeisner profile catches @jesse_welles in the studio in Nashville and builds a fine sketch of his hockeystick track - a tough label-driven grunge slog and now spare fun mixing off-the-news broadsides and writerly tunes. (no paywall)
nytimes.com/2025/02/12/art… I see Welles as an update to the #fastfolk movement I wrote about in The Times in 1999...
3/ #fastfolk back in the day, and now. Image
Read 4 tweets
Andrew Revkin 🌎 ✍🏼 🪕 ☮️ Profile picture
Feb 12
I finally figured out why @realDonaldTrump covets #Greenland. He wants to own Sondie Arctic Desert Golf Course - the world's northernmost permanent 18-hole course.

Here's my 2004 New York Times story (link in thread) with a few of my photos: Kangerlussuaq Journal; Golf Under a Handicap: Icy Cold Is Par for the Course 🧵⛳️Image
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Out for an afternoon half-round of golf before heading to his job as a night watchman at the Kangerlussuaq Hotel, Peter Tollerup lined up what he hoped would be his final putt. It was a 20-footer, daunting not just for its length but also because of the bitter wind blowing off the vast ice sheet that covers 85 percent of this giant Arctic island.

The thermometer may have read an unusually balmy 40 degrees, but it felt a lot colder. Daunting, too, because there was nothing smooth and green about this putting green, which consisted not of grass but of tamped gray alluvial till, the espresso-fine powdered rock that is produced when a great grinding ice sheet scours bedrock.

Mr. Tollerup came up five feet short. ''Ah, well,'' he said. ''We're just practicing today.'' His partner, Soren Pinderup, the cook at the hotel, wearing a tropical-weight African shirt, missed his five-footer. They tapped in and headed for the clubhouse, a pair of brown trailers that were the only structures visible in this stretch of a barren glacier-carved valley that runs 115 miles west from the ice sheet to the coast.

Such is golf on what residents here contend is the northernmost permanent 18-hole golf course in the world, about 35 miles above the Arctic Circle. (The word permanent is important because there is plenty of ''ice golf'' played farther north, in places like Thule and Uummannaq, Greenland, hundreds of miles closer to the top of the globe. But those matches take place on temporary courses marked out on frozen lakes and similar spots.)Image
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The Sondie Arctic Desert Golf Course, as residents here call it, is named after the Sondrestromfjord, the valley here that was until 1992 home to the American Sondrestrom Air Base. The base has since become a sleepy international airport and science and tourism hub of about 350 people.

Mr. Tollerup, a Dane who has spent 33 of his 59 years here, said the course was conceived in 1986 by two helicopter pilots for Greenlandair, the domestic airline for Greenland. The island has been a self-governing part of Denmark since 1979. Mr. Tollerup helped them design the course after one of the pilots surveyed and photographed the area from above.

The course, such as it is, is essentially unmodified terrain that has been defined either as fairway, tee, green or rough by markers and flags.

For the most part it has been a low-budget labor of love, created with scraped-together donations of equipment and scraps of material, like the foot-square plastic-grass mats placed by some players beneath a ball where it lies so that clubs other than a sand wedge can be used. Mr. Tollerup had not played golf before this course was opened, but said he saw it as another way to enjoy ''the free and fresh air and nature here.'' He now plays two or three times a week, as early as February, when winter darkness ebbs and temperatures climb to about 5 degrees, and as late as October.Image
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Read 6 tweets
Andrew Revkin 🌎 ✍🏼 🪕 ☮️ Profile picture
Feb 5
In retrospect it's kind of funny that I chose emergency brakes as the metaphor for the role of litigation in slowing the Trump Musk demolition derby. I just noticed pressure from @autosinnovate @GM @VW @Toyota et al has @SeanDuffyWI @USDOT reviewing new rule requiring automatic emergency brakes by 2029. Links in 🧵Image
.@autosinnovate had just filed suit (under the incoming industry-friendly administration) challenging the @NHTSAgov rule. Fine @davidshepardson @Reuters sustained reporting. 2/ reuters.com/business/autos…Image
From the story: @autoinnovate CEO John Bozzella called the decision "wrong on the merits. Wrong on the science. Really a disastrous decision."
Bozzella wrote in November to President-elect Donald Trump, urging him to reconsider the regulation. So here we go. So much for my emergency brake metaphor. Trump will surely pull the emergency break on the rule.
Read 7 tweets

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