A series of images of a weekend burst of energy and water into the European weather system starting 8am on Saturday 17th.
2nd image: 3pm 17th - percussive impact as WMA water hits EU system over Aegean.
3rd image: 9.30am 18th - 5 separate weather systems. #EUClimateChange
The impact of an injection of rain bearing air from West Africa northwards on Europe weather is striking.
A low pressure system is forecast to develop over Western Russia. This displaces the ridge of high pressure which had briefly reversed the flow of cold arctic air south.
This happens almost immediately - and has an immediate catastrophic impact on anticipated European temperatures which are now set to plummet and stay low for a fortnight.
European @ECMWF model simulations run last week did not contain the burst of water coming up across Africa. (1st image), today's is actual weather pattern is strikingly similar, but for this. (2nd image). And this is why most Euro forecasts are now wrong.
This is the latest Euro @ECMWF model forecast for Europe. It shows the quantity of précipitable water in the air. Arctic air has none and is represented in the image as black & grey.
We can compare this from what was forecast by the Supercomputers just three days ago.
In this simulation we start in the same place (midnight this morning). It starts in a similar way - but the outcome is - as you see completely different. The rain clouds win and the cold dry air heads back north towards Russia.
For those of you who are interested here are the corresponding 16/4 and 19/4 @ECEMWF MLSP charts for Wednesday. Today's is on the left, and what was forecast on Thursday is on the right.
Here we see forecast European temperatures for Saturday 24th April (midnight [top] and midday [bottom])
[left] today's forecast.
vs
[right] what it had been expected to be as of 72 hours ago.
Ok so this is a bit weird, but in a kinda chill way so do bare with me and and I will be happy to answer questions afterwards. It’s about a castle on a virtual island in a massive online role playing game called Evony and it involves a possible but speculative discussion about @elonmusk and @X.
All will be revealed but first a picture or four actually from the game. More will come.
Ok. So here’s what I think is going on in a nutshell. I think elonmusk has invested in a MMORPG: a “Massive Multimedia Online Role Playing Game” which is a bit of a mouthful, called EVONY.
I liked its Twitter ads and finally clicked. It’s huge. Someone else can do the business story here which I am sure is interesting too.
But the this bit is weird.
The mysterious knight on the red horse arrived this morning beside my castle and he had some treasure.
I hadn’t a clue who it was so I grabbed the treasure and tried to kill the horse and rider as that’s what you do. But we got smashed badly.
This interview with working class Uk financial markets savant Gary Stevenson - who has just published an autobiography - is seriously terrifying. He now has a @YouTube channel it seems and I’ll post a link shortly.
James O'Brien meets Gary Stevenson | LBC via @YouTube
His prognosis for the collapse of social democratic nation state finances due to the very sharp rise in income distribution inequality in the UK is horrific.
The consequences of unfettered transfers of money over decades due to neoliberal economics initially and more recently quantitative easing driven transfers of wealth from the middle class to the top 5% of the population is the cause of his concern.
It’s very hard to imagine what can be done politically to rebalance this.
Thomas Piketty’s thesis which among other things warned about all of this based on long term historical analysis of wealth inequality appears to be colliding with Western Civilisation in a manner that threatens the very foundations of that civilisation.
Gary’s YouTube channel which addresses all this is here.
Well this was actually pretty good… very little crazy right wing stuff - none in fact - some light criticism of wokeness and a consensus that Hitler was a socialist or communist dictator not a rightwing liberal fascist - mercifully no discussion of Greenland Panama or Canada
The bit at the end was actually quite nice and agreement about ending the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
Importantly and probably deliberately there was very little to zero overt electioneering - a little bit of criticism of Weidel’s Spitzencandidat competition from Weidle but nothing extreme.
So nothing imo that could be seen as being election interference IMO - nor any reason for the DSA to be concerned or to get involved.
I didn’t even hear any particularly overt endorsement that went beyond that you might hear in passing in a podcast interview.
It ended with a discussion of mars - Elon’s favourite subject of conversation - which was quite interesting including a reference to the Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy series and Douglas Adams.
From Weidel’s point of view though there was a lot of positive moderate exposure of her party and probably around 200k + listeners. Which may give her a bounce in the polls.
Also the final segment talking about space was quite delightful and genuine and portrayed the AFD Leader in a positive light.
And I’d say the two of them have both found a new friend.
This is an update thread on this OCCRP story on @StateDept and @USAID funding for several large investigative journalism projects which has had a lot of downstream impacts it seems. Especially in Europe,
The underlying original story about govt funding for investigative journalism projects was initially flagged by @ryangrim.
This organisation - OCCRP that not many people seemed to have been aware of - was responsible for a series of outstanding investigative journalism consortia projects including the Panama papers.
This is a leaked rough cut of the NDR (German public broadcaster north west Germany) investigation into what happened With the OCCRP story.
It was never officially published but was recently leaked publicly by Wikileaks.
With the benefit of hindsight arguably Wikileaks ought to be the international organisation that coordinates these large investigative consortia, though it’s not clear that they want to do so.
What is clear from the fallout from all of this is that the system that was in place for running these consortia is no longer fit for purpose.