1. Sunrise on Karl, it may be a trick of the early light but I can see a larger low level circulation that fully surrounds the 2nd larger part of Karl.
2. The second image says where we are supposed to be now in the model timeline and it certainly looks about right.
At 458,000km2 of overall sunrise convection & adjacent cloud and 187,000 km2 of intense sunsrise convection the 2 parts of #KARL are certainly starting stronger this morning than yesterday.
This animation is 4 hours and started at 7am local time so well before sunrise. At first glance it looks like the northern part of the RH arm of Karl is already being effected by west-east shear.
On the LFS there is clearly aspinning vortex there, albeit with little structure.
Here is what is forecast to happen to this storm over the next 117 hours. This is the 13:06Z GFS model run for Precipitable water, which is mostly what this event is all about - that and the Tehuantepec wind gap #TSKarl#Karl is expected cross around midnight tonight.
However according to the forecast that is far from the end of this as far as Mexico is concerned. Several more Tehuantepec wind gap events are forecast after #Karl gets squelched over the following 200 hours.
Looks like inter-ocean ping pong with storms accross the Tehuantepec gap - with a high probability of more hurricanes.
There is a real forecast possibility of two more before the 18th, which could raise Central America's Hurricane count to 4 in 10 days.
Which is why I am so interested in what happens to #Karl.
When the remnants of #Julia went through the gap the storm became two - #Karl & #Invest99E. This sort of thing could conceivably continue beyond next Tuesday.
Current 29/10 Forecast:
It would perhaps be farcical if it weren't also killing people, and destroying property and infrastructure.
The 2nd cause to this event is this >>
Animation: Unusual atmospheric conditions in North America delivering an endless series of arctic wind blasts.
Its almost like north America has been occupied by a weather hydra that hates hurricanes. The endless series of arctic blasts are also preventing water from escaping the Carribean and Gulf via the usual route up the Eastern Seaboard.
In monitoring this I am hoping to see #Karl get away to the East and restore a normal weather system. Pakistan had 20 straight days of aberrant torrential rain and it was the catastrophe of the year. It would be terrible for Central America if something similar happened again.
This explanation is partly for #NHC_Atlantic's forecasters who may by now be wondering why a journalist is constantly second guessing their cyclone warnings.
That's me for this thread - I will be back later to see what has happened.
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.