Climate Crisis -- More About Enriching Elitists Than Weather

from IBD Editorials:
Climatologists are learning from economists. No, not how to more accurately forecast the future. Climatologists could certainly benefit from improving their forecasts, but they aren't likely to learn how from economists.
What climatologists are learning from economists is how to increase their importance by promoting a theory that gives politicians more power. Economists have shown that this can be accomplished with the flimsiest of evidence.
Economists began gaining in importance after World War II when they started rallying around a 1930s theory developed by John Maynard Keynes. The theory explained how politicians could prevent, or reverse, economic downturns by running budget deficits, and prevent, or halt, inflation by running budget surpluses.
Claiming budget deficits during World War II ended the Great Depression, economists convinced politicians to establish the Council of Economic Advisers in 1946 to give economic advice to the president.
By the 1960s there were claims of a Keynesian consensus of informed economists, with these economists knowing how to fine-tune the economy, effectively eliminating the business cycle, with advice on when and how to adjust government budgets to stimulate or dampen economic activity.
The result was better for economists than it was for the economy. The pronouncements of economists became more newsworthy, and government jobs for economists multiplied as the economy moved into the stagflation — economic stagnation with increasing unemployment and rising inflation — that characterized economic performance in the 1970s.
Stagflation had been predicted by Milton Friedman in the 1960s, even though the Keynesian model implied it was impossible. As a result of improved theories and accumulating evidence, the pretense of a Keynesian consensus among economists began to unravel. But the political popularity of Keynesian policy was not seriously threatened by its failures because that popularity was never based on solid evidence.
Rather, politicians embraced Keynesianism because it gave them a justification for expanding current benefits while postponing the costs with deficit spending. Of course, they conveniently forgot the part about reducing spending and running budget surpluses when the economy is strong.
Climatologists are now emulating economists' approach to political success. After an attempt to create a global cooling scare in the 1970s failed, mainly because weather trends have a tendency to reverse themselves, some climatologists reversed themselves as well with predictions of global warming.
And this time they had a theory indicating that the warming was the man-made result of carbon dioxide emissions, and that if nothing was done it would soon be too late to avoid a global catastrophe.