Today's #EuropeBigWet update. Russia is getting pummelled. Italy is on fire with thunderstorms and central Europe is getting busy.
For context click on the hashtag for earlier episodes. This has been building up for a while. Thread....
It started modestly even though the warm air over Europe is increasingly saturated with moisture. And then as the day got hotter the thunderstorms got active.
This afternoon Italy in particular looks as if it is undergoing something potentially rather dangerous.
To the south, Morocco & Algeria continue to receive a lot of attention from the Atlantic, and as we will see later a horizontal of stream of moisture is heading along the North African coast all the way to the Levant. Some is turning north and feeding what the Russian leviathan.
The Russian Leviathan Storm - my name - is now a week old, gradulally moving north and growing, and now dumping huge amounts of rain on Moscow. St Petersburg is still out of harm's way but for how much longer?
The models remain largely in agreement through to the weekend about the scenario before disagreeing a fair bit about what happens after the Arctic Rebound.
They agree that this will dislodge the Leviathan, but how fast and what happens next, not so much.
Here are four 48 hour rainfall forecasts, for today and tomorrow till midnight. Bare in mind that rainfall forecasts in these circumstances are devilishly difficult to compute.
And here are four 10-day forecasts. At this range the intensity levels are impossible to predict with accuracy - but they provide a guide as to what to expect.
Here's a 16 day forecast from the king of the supercomputer modelling systems, the United States @NOAA GFS (global forecast system), the only one that dares.
Finally. Here are a series of images (spaced three days apart) that show the cause of all of this. I.E. the Atlantic.
And here is an academic paper which addresses the issue of how it is happening >> pnas.org/content/118/23…
Images: 1. Today 2. Saturday 3. Next Tues. 4. Next Fri.
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.