A thread looking at the first month of 2022 from a very zoomed out perspective. A series of 30 day animations of satellite imagery from @NASA Worldview.
We begin in the South West Indian Ocean which is currently being monstered by a new Cyclone Alley.
@NASA Next stop the South West Pacific which has had several Cyclones, but thankfully none making landfall in NZ. << touch wood >>.
@NASA Staying mostly in the Southern Hemisphere we now look at South America and the extraordinary Amazon Basin which has experienced record flooding and had a remarkable impact this winter on both North and South Africa producing massive atmospheric rivers to the NE and SE.
@NASA In the Northern Hemisphere we begin in the North Western Indian Ocean and travel East. Here we see the Indian Subcontinent, Central Asia, the Himalayas and Western Pacific.
In both the Northern and Southern Hemisphere (except in the tropics) the flow of water is West-East.
The Tropical and North Pacific.... the largest expanse of Ocean on the Planet & source of a very large portion of the world's atmospheric moisture.
Nth. America's weather patterns this January were driven in large part by flows of Pacific and water south eastwards from the Pacific and north eastwards over Mexico, where they joined tropical water flows from the Tropical Atlantic and Amazon producing a series of bomb cyclones.
Europe has also had a stormy winter as these two sources of water joined over the North Atlantic and then proceeded Eastwards and South Eastwards where they had a significant impact on weather in the Middle East.
In the above animation you can see there was a brief period of fairly clear air over Europe in Mid January when the North Atlantic was less effected by tropical water flows, but that period of relative calm is now over.
North Africa and the ME was where this effort of climate observation began last year and in January focussed on Sahara water transport which produced a series of spectacular rain events over the Middle East.
The data set overlays used for this thread are provided by a new service provided by @NASA's enhanced geostationary satellite service which has an open data set of satellite images of the planet dating back to 2000. worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov
This can be accessed by clicking on the highlighted square (highlighted in yellow) top left when you open the home page.
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.