As nations of the world meet in NYC at #UNGA discusses Climate Change cooperation in advance of @COP26 there is a monster low pressure circulation/storm over Eastern parts of Europe.
And the weather forecast for the next five days looks a little hairy.
@COP26 Meanwhile a few 1000 kms to the south East rains over the Arabian Peninsula and Horn of Africa picked up again today.
@COP26 Zooming out we see that there are also multiple tropical storm candidates in the Tropical Atlantic which at a practical level make forecasting in Europe a little unpredictable as their path and intensity is very hard to predict.
There are two major factors driving this the Jet-stream level winds 11-18kms up which are moving water around, and the quantity of water in the atmosphere.
Here we see a 72 hour forecast which contains a powerful jet coming at Europe across the North Atlantic.
We also see a strong West to East flow across North Africa which will be also carrying tropical moisture, from tropical ears in the East Atlantic off the coast of Africa.
This animation shows a five day forecast of airborne Precipitable water. Both the Nth Atl. and Nth Africa atmospheric rivers can be seen. And also several cold air incursions from the north. When cold air & moist air collide we can expect rain.
Here we have a 6 day temperature forecast in 6 hourly increments. Its not freezing, but its also not particularly warm.
Finally we have a water vapour transport simulation plot which shows pressure, jets and water vapour together.
This currently shows the Canadian vapour jet pushing the low pressure system east.
And this plot shows the current rainfall solution which comes from all these inputs - this is over five days.
There is nothing hazardous in this at the moment, but it depends a lot on whether the Canadian Jet dislodges the low pressure system.
It was a circulation like this, with northerly (arctic) and South Western (atlantic) inputs which led to the devastating flooding in July.
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.