Martin Gurri’ book The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium has gotten lots of praise.

For example, Tyler:

I am reading this splendid book for the first time. It basically explains why Brexit and Trump won, and what will happen next. Due to social media, we are disillusioned with our elites, and that will prove hard to reverse. (more)

Here is a summary by Arnold Kling:

The insiders operate within formal organizational structures, such as corporations, universities, and government agencies. These organizations have regular processes for setting goals and making decisions. There is a formal hierarchy, … The outsiders operate without formal organizational structures. They have no planning process. Their tactics are ad hoc. … The outsiders’ credentials, if they even have any, have little relevance. …

Activists who wanted to foment demonstrations against the government had to form organizations and distribute newsletters, where today they can instigate flash mobs using text messages. … Insiders see the existing order as something to preserve and improve upon. Their proposals for reform are limited and specific. They take into account constraints imposed by economic and political realities. …

Outsiders can only articulate what they are against. They can identify flaws in the existing order. But they lack a vision for reform or the skills to govern. … the dominant strategies of insiders and outsiders will lead to an outcome in which government performance worsens, legitimacy declines, and conflict increases. (more)

And one by Noah Smith:

Social media has empowered the public, and that the public is using its newfound power to attack – but not to replace – the dominant institutions of society. … Gurri defines the public as the set of people who are interested enough in a particular issue to pay attention and get involved. … Social media, … freeing [public] from the control of centralized, hierarchical push-media. …

The newly empowered public, he argues, has not focused on building things up, but on breaking them down. The public’s goal is negation – denunciation of respected leaders, derailment of political programs, overthrow of parties or governments, discrediting of institutions, etc. Gurri worries that this constant anti-everything attitude will descend into “nihilism”, and that weakened institutions will be trapped in an eternal stalemate with an eternally raging public. (more)

Here is Gurri himself:

We stand at the earliest moment of what promises to be a cataclysmic expansion of information and communication technologies: the fifth wave. … The fourth wave, now nearly spent, was that of mass media. Its organization was industrial, its orientation commercial or propagandistic, but its most radical innovation – the difference between what transpired before and after – was the demand for a silent public. … That has changed forever. … The public … has largely stopped listening, and it has started talking back. …

The question is what happens … fragmentation, leading almost to disintegration. The mass public was an invention of the mass media. What actually exists is a variegated patchwork of people and groups … Countries not burdened by the despot’s choice have seen the public assume a fractured shape consistent with its actual preferences. In the US, it is probably more accurate to speak of the public in the plural: many publics, speaking with many voices. …

Marginal players have seized on the new technologies to increase their audience and influence – only to collide with political and professional hierarchies horrified by such barbarian invasions into their proprietary fiefs. … The end can only be the discrediting of authoritative elites, … the new technologies have given the power of speech to a silent public, to players marginalized by the media monopoly over the information space. … It’s early days. … Digital natives, riding the fifth wave, will then burst upon the world as breakers of governments and overturners of elites. (more)

The meat of the book is a half dozen case studies of protest movements in the early 2010s, from around the world, wherein vocal & active but otherwise ordinary people complained loudly about a failure they attributed to official institutions. As such protesters were reluctant to create or endorse formal organizations or parties, and were much less interested in policy details, they mostly had limited impacts such as getting people to quit or reversing recent policy changes.

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March 29, 2019 at 08:42AM

From Heartland March 28, 2019 By Nancy J. Thorner Most people in America don’t even realize that tentacles of a dangerous United Nations program are being enacted in our nation’s cities and certainly our country, with the full cooperation of those in our highest positions of authority. Most people in America don’t even realize that…

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March 29, 2019 at 08:10AM

The Green New Deal could well fracture the Democratic coalition, pitting billionaire funders and upper-middle-class green ­activists against blue-collar workers and ethnic minorities for whom well-paying jobs and cost of living come first.

Tuesday’s 57-0 Senate vote against the Green New Deal, with 43 Democrats voting “present,” shows how Republicans can win on this nutty issue. But their attacks haven’t quite yet hit the bull’s-eye.

At the heart of the GND is a plan to outlaw hydrocarbon energy and produce all electricity from wind, solar and other ­renewables. This isn’t just wildly impractical. It would deliver a crippling blow to the economy. Coal, oil and gas left in the ground are jobs and income buried forever, causing a permanent contraction in the productive capacity of the economy. The GND would thus be a declaration of war on blue-collar America, imperiling the Trump recovery and its half a million new manufacturing jobs.

Republicans have decried the GND as “socialist.” But whatever its real-world outcomes, and they were horrendous, at least the old socialism in theory sought to advance the economic interests of the working class. The GND does the opposite.

Subsidizing wind and solar while rooting out carbon is very expensive. That’s why industrial electricity prices in Europe are nearly 50 percent higher than they are in the rest of the Group of 20 advanced nations — and why energy firms are loath to invest in Europe.

Transplanting such European-style policies across the Atlantic, as the GND essentially aims to do, would kill energy jobs and drive up the price of energy in America. For American workers, the unspoken message from GND environmentalists is: Go and learn computer programming, or at best you will end up wiping snow and sand off solar panels.

The GND, in other words, is ­redistributionist, yes, but the redistribution goes from the bottom to the top — from the poor and from workers to wind and solar investors. Again, Europe’s example is ­instructive. The drive to subsidize renewable energy led Britain to drop its pledge to abolish fuel poverty. The official measure of fuel poverty, defined as households spending 10 percent or more of their income on energy, kept rising. So it was ­replaced with a new government definition less sensitive to rising ­energy costs, instantly halving the number of households officially deemed fuel poor.

Meanwhile in Germany, Europe’s wealthiest country, at one stage more than 300,000 households a year were being disconnected ­because of ­unpaid bills.

“It is only gradually becoming apparent how the ­renewable energy subsidies redistribute money from the poor to the more affluent,” the left-of-center Der Spiegel newspaper editorialized. Energy companies know that the best way to avoid accusations of price gouging is to claim that it’s to fight climate change. For this reason, ­renewable energy acts as a conspiracy against the less well-off.

In the US, a capitalist aristocracy is pushing wind and solar. Its members include blue-blooded capital from the likes of the Rockefeller, MacArthur and Ford foundations, and Silicon Valley billionaires touting phony claims of 100 percent ­renewable energy. Climate change is ethics for the super-rich. The self-righteous rhetoric of this aristocracy legitimizes the vast accumulations of wealth by the green robber barons of the 21st century.

The big question Republicans should ask is: Why?

Successful prosecutors show the motive behind the crime. So it is in politics. The supposed motive ­behind the GND — fighting climate change — doesn’t wash. If the scheme were genuinely about climate change, green activists would be campaigning to expand nuclear power rather than trying to shut it down. The truth is the climate war isn’t about climate. It is and always has been deeply ideological.

Control energy to reverse the ­Industrial Revolution and abolish industrial capitalism — these are the real targets of green ideology.

The progressives’ climate war is a war that will be lost before the first shot is fired. America doesn’t exist in a climate bubble. China, India and other developing economies are going to keep growing and keep emitting. The good news is that the GND could well fracture the Democratic coalition, pitting billionaire funders and upper-middle-class green ­activists against blue-collar workers and ethnic minorities for whom well-paying jobs and cost of living come first.

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March 29, 2019 at 07:22AM

By Paul Homewood

 

This is a classic example of how the climate mafia operates:

 

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says that the physical and financial impacts of global warming are accelerating.

Record greenhouse gas levels are driving temperatures to "increasingly dangerous levels", it says.

Their report comes in the same week as the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported a surge in CO2 in 2018.

However, new data from the UK suggests Britain is bucking the trend with emissions down by 3%.

This year’s State of the Climate report from the WMO is the 25th annual record of the climate.

When it first came out in 1993, carbon dioxide levels were at 357 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere. These have now risen to 405.5ppm and are expected to increase further.

This is having a significant impact on temperatures, with 2018 the fourth warmest year on record, almost 1C above what they were in the period between 1850-1900.

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Hurricane Florence was one of 14 disasters causing over $1bn in damages

The years between 2015 and 2018 were the four warmest on that record, the study says.

"This report makes it very clear that the impacts of climate change are accelerating," said Prof Samantha Hepburn who is director of the Centre for Energy and Natural Resource Law at Deakin University in Australia.

"We know that if the current trajectory for greenhouse gas concentrations continues, temperatures may increase by 3 – 5 degrees C compared to pre-industrial levels by the end of the century and we have already reached 1 degree."

While some of these figures were published in a preliminary release of the study from last November, the full version has data on many key climate indicators, that the WMO says break new ground.

One example is ocean heat content. More than 90% of the energy trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the seas and according to the WMO, 2018 saw new records set for the amount of ocean heat content found in the upper 700 metres of the seas, and also for the upper 2,000 metres.

Sea levels also continued to increase with global mean sea level rising 3.7mm higher in 2018 than the previous year.

"This report highlights the increase in the rate of sea-level rise, and this is a real concern for those living in low-lying coastal areas, for both developed and developing countries," said Dr Sally Brown, a research fellow at the University of Southampton.

"We know that sea-level rise is a global problem that will not go away, and efforts need to be made to help those who are really vulnerable to adapt to sea-level rise or move to safer areas."

2018 Climate impacts

• According to the report, most of the natural hazards that affected nearly 62 million people in 2018 were associated with extreme weather and climate events.
• Some 35 million people were hit by floods.
• Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Michael were just two of 14 "billion dollar disasters" in 2018 in the US.
• Super Typhoon Mangkhut affected 2.4 million people in and killed 134, mainly in the Philippines.
• More than 1,600 deaths were linked to heat waves and wildfires in Europe, Japan and US.
• Kerala in India suffered the heaviest rainfall and worst flooding in nearly a century

The head of the WMO say that the signals of warming continue to be seen in events since the turn of the year.

"Extreme weather has continued in the early 2019, most recently with Tropical Cyclone Idai, which caused devastating floods and tragic loss of life in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi. It may turn out to be one of the deadliest weather-related disasters to hit the southern hemisphere," said WMO Secretary General Petteri Taalas.

"Idai made landfall over the city of Beira: a rapidly growing, low-lying city on a coastline vulnerable to storm surges and already facing the consequences of sea level rise. Idai’s victims personify why we need the global agenda on sustainable development, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction," said Mr Taalas.

The report has been launched at a news conference in New York attended by the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

"There is no longer any time for delay," he wrote in a foreword to the new study.

However earlier this week the International Energy Agency published worrying data, indicating that in 2018 carbon emissions were up 1.7%, as a result of the fastest growth in energy use in the last six years.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47723577

The WMO was at the heart of the global warming scam when it began in the 1970s. Every year they publish propaganda reports like this, which the likes of Matt McGrath dutifully report as gospel truth, without any attempt to challenge.

This year the WMO has picked a few weather events and used a thoroughly meaningless sea level rise statistic to pretend that the global impacts of climate change are accelerating.

 

First that claim of a sea level rise of 3.7mm during the year.

Even the people who measure sea levels say that one year’s data is meaningless. For instance, AVISO state:

for scientific and statistics reasons, period under 5 years are not significant

Sea levels fluctuate from year to year for perfectly natural reasons, such as ENSO changes. In addition, the error margins are huge.

Proper oceanographers maintain that sea levels should be measured over decades, and not years. For instance, Bruce Douglas:

It is well established that sea level trends obtained from tide gauge records shorter than about 50-60 years are corrupted by interdecadal sea level variation.

 What we do know is that evidence from tide gauges around the world clearly shows sea levels have been steadily rising since the late 19thC, as the world has recovered from the Little Ice Age:

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/jevrejevaetal2013gpchange.pdf 

Furthermore, the IPCC has acknowledged that:

It is very likely that the mean rate of global averaged sea level rise was 1.7 [1.5 to 1.9] mm/yr between 1901 and 2010 and 3.2 [2.8 to 3.6] mm/yr between 1993 and 2010. Tide gauge and satellite altimeter data are consistent regarding the higher rate during the latter period. It is likely that similarly high rates occurred between 1920 and 1950.

 

The WMO then goes on to pick out a couple of hurricanes, deliberately ignoring the fact that hurricane activity last year was pretty average:

http://www.policlimate.com/tropical/

 

As for the floods in Kerala, said to be the worst in nearly a century, one can only ask what caused the ones a century ago!

They even have the nerve to say that Cyclone Idai, which recently hit Mozambique was a signal of warming continue to be seen in events since the turn of the year.

Very strange, since hurricane activity in the SH has been relatively subdued in recent years:

 

http://www.policlimate.com/tropical/

 

 

The WMO report is nothing more than the sort of political propaganda you would expect from the UN agency.

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March 29, 2019 at 06:51AM