ABC peddles yet more alarmist BS

Here's a discipline I have never encountered before: "climate law". However, it's not surprising that such a discipline is emerging since most Western governments are hell bent on imposing legislation to try to control a harmless trace gas, and such legislation will need lawyers to interpret it. Anyway, the ABC gives Amanda McKenzie, who has just completed her honours thesis in "climate law", free reign to spout the usual alarmist BS that we've come to expect from our national broadcaster. In an article entitled "It's the Climate, stupid", she opines:

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a grouping of over 2,000 of the world's best climate scientists, 550 ppm gives us an almost certain chance of warming the planet by 2 degrees. While 2 degrees doesn't sound like much, it is widely agreed to be a dangerous threshold that should not be crossed. Two degrees may trigger "runaway climate change", that is, where natural systems start releasing greenhouse gases in such quantities that temperatures rise 4, 5, 6, 7 or 8 degrees, leaving much of the planet uninhabitable.

Actually, it's nowhere near 2000 - less than a hundred reviewed the key chapter of the IPCC's 2007 report, and most of them regularly peer-review each others' papers. And far from approaching a "tipping point", the planet has actually cooled since 2001... She then quotes AGW arch-crackpot James Hansen, whose GISS surface temperature records demonstrate little about global climate, but show urbanisation very well:

He states that this target [400 ppm] is required if "humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed". For Australia this means implementing targets of at least 40 per cent by 2020. While it will be substantially more costly now to set scientifically based targets, in the long term it is highly benefical as it gives us the best chance of sustaining Australia's key natural, irreplaceable assets on which we depend.

She, like most writers on this subject, completely ignores the fact that Australia reducing its CO2 by 40% by 2020 will do nothing for global CO2 levels (actually a 0.6% reduction), and, even if CO2 does affect climate (which is far from certain, despite what those two thousand of the world's best scientists at the IPCC say), will make not an iota of difference to global climate. What it will do, however, with absolute certainty, is destroy our economy and the standards of living that Australia has spent decades raising. All of which is irrelevant of course when it comes to "saving the planet".

Read it here.