The thread begins with the mother of all deserts the astonishing Sahara. Here you see an April rain event currently underway in Algeria and Libya. #Sahara#DesertRain#EarthDay21
Here are close up images of the Libya/Algeria #DesertRain now traversing the dryest parts of the Sahara. The 1st image (zoom.earth/#view=30.2,17.…) shows rainfall signatures. The 2nd tracks the tail of this rain event back to the Atlantic coast 4500 kms to the West. #EarthDayAfrica
Meanwhile to the east yet another #SaudiArabia desert storm has sparked up in the North West. Saudi Arabia has had storms every day since the beginning of Ramadan with huge storms last Friday and Saturday. See @Arab_Storms for pics. #ArabianStorms#EarthDayKSA
Directly south of the Levant Ethiopia's little rainy season is rapidly strengthening in the build up to the full on Abbay Monsoon in July which provides 86% of northern Nile flow. The first image shows the rains getting started for the day this morning. #EarthdayEthiopia#Monsoon
This second wider image shows a wider picture of the Horn of Africa - Ethiopia in the center, Somalia (east 2nd day of intense coastal thunderstorms), South Sudan in the West and Uganda and Lake Victoria (the source of the White Nile) in the South. #EarthDay21#HornOfAfrica
While there is no desert in Europe today there is an astonishing rain event underway, caused by a flow of Atlantic energised wet air which started last Friday. The same path is being used by the storm currently traversing the Sahara highlighted in the first part of this thread.
This huge northern storm extends into the Arctic. Its 5.2 mn sq km size puts it between India (3.3 mn) and Australia (7.7 mn) in size and it is forecast to drop lots of rain and snow over Russia, East Europe, Scandinavia & the Kazakhstan desert this week.
Here's a @zoom_earth animation of the storms in Europe. There are also big storms moving through Spain, Italy and what looks like an enormous field of thunderstorms moving in an orderly fashion across Eastern Europe. #EarthDayEU#EarthDayEurope
And the final #DesertRain animation for this #EarthDay21thread shows satellite imagery of rain falling on the 2.5 million sq km2 Centrial Asian Kazakhstan Desert [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_se…], the remaining large desert in the North Western hemisphere.
This image is to help orient the viewer for the animation which follows. [It looks like it may also be raining in Mongolia here, and Tibet and Xinjiang which are not included in this story.]
And the final animation. Which has a lot going on. Wet air coming in from Europe in the West (left). A complex multi layered system in the East (right) and something small shooting in very rapidly from the North. The Caspian sea can be seen in the bottom left corner.
The final image in this #Earthday21#EarthDay#DesertRain thread shows a @NASA (Modis) Worldview image of the Eastern half of the North Western Hemisphere for today, roughly the same scene shown as that in the first tweet in this thread.
I'm grateful to this amazing living planet.
While I will only ever see parts of it in person, thanks to the wizardry of modern satellite technology and the internet I can now remotely sense it all in real time.
Hopefully this technology will help us save it. #EarthDay
This is pathetic from @realDonaldTrump he’s lashing out like an angry teenager. Jerome Powell says he’s included a the costs of a building that was completed years ago in his very public attack on the FED Chair.
Trump has completely lost the plot. The single most damaging thing that he could do to undermine confidence in the U.S. dollar (which he publicly claims to want to deflate and there by make all Americans poorer - is to attack the Federal Reserve and the SEC.
@realDonaldTrump Trump is setting fire to the dollar to distract from his Epstein mess what a complete baby.
I attended the Bonn climate talks. They were very disappointing to everyone. The elephant in the room was (of course) the U.S. decision to withdraw from the talks altogether.
Unfortunately.. perhaps intentionally in advance of the continuation of climate talks regardless of #US_Disintigration the talks were also very sparsely attended particularly by activists and NGOs. The reason for this was @elonmusk destroying @-USAID.
@elonmusk As you can see the USAID Twitter account is now dead - deleted which is an appalling act of vandalism executed by Elon and his tech-bro team of teenagers.
This article is deeply depressing. For my part at Scoop.co.nz it is clear to me that:
1. The Govt has a deliberate strategy - probably not official but nevertheless operative to destroy NZ media. 2. This is not going to change any time soon. thespinoff.co.nz/politics/02-07…
& Sadly from what I discerned last year the @nzlabour opposition is both apathetic and indifferent to the plight of media. Also the @NZGreens. And have always been so for as long as I can remember.
This is extremely disappointing
@nzlabour @NZGreens I will be returning to NZ in August to ensure continues to function in these very difficult times for NZ media. We have faced numerous big challenges recently and thank our supporters and readers for their support.Scoop.co.nz
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.