Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video No, it doesn't. Most analysts are telling us the direct action policy will prove to be a dud: it will either cost far more, or achieve far less, than the Coalition claims. And Abbott says expenditure on the plan is capped. Not that Labor is making too much of it. By deciding to align our carbon price with Europe's next year - by which time it is unlikely to have risen much above its current derisory level - Kevin Rudd has retreated even further from confronting the ''great moral challenge of our time''. Six years ago, Rudd won government, at least in part, by portraying John Howard as yesterday's man on climate change. Now neither party wants to mention the phrase, because voters have stopped caring. Great Barrier Reef: under threat from global climate change. What's changed? A lot of things.

The weather. In 2007 we were still in the middle of one of the longest droughts in our recorded history. We were being told that the rains might never return. But they did. Domestic politics. Abbott's defeat of Malcolm Turnbull by a single vote signalled the end of political consensus on climate change. Many pundits, back then, thought Abbott's opposition to an emissions trading scheme would make him unelectable. How wrong they were. International politics. Just weeks after Abbott became Opposition Leader, the Copenhagen summit failed. If the rest of the world is doing little to combat climate change, he could ask, why should we? The price of electricity. It has soared: largely to pay for gold-plating the grid after decades of underinvestment, and to meet state and federal renewable energy targets. But those price rises handed Abbott a powerful weapon against Julia Gillard's ''great big new tax'' - and besides, she had ''lied'' about it, hadn't she? The global economic order. As the European Union's economy has imploded, its carbon price has shrunk and its clout in the world has weakened. Meanwhile, China and India's demand for raw materials - in particular, for coal to feed their power stations - has grown more urgent. Australian coal exports more than doubled in value between 2007 and 2008; there are plans for massive further expansion. And the Climate Commission is telling us to leave it in the ground? Get real!

The climate itself hasn't changed enough: global atmospheric temperatures have remained stubbornly stable for more than a decade and a half. The boffins tell us the excess heat is being stored in the oceans; or that all is explained by long-term temperature cycles in the eastern Pacific. The sceptics have scoffed. And that scoffing has dominated the non-scientific conversation. Alan Jones, Andrew Bolt, Chris Smith, Jason Morrison, Piers Akerman, Nick Cater, Janet Albrechtsen, Paul Sheehan, Paul Kelly, Chris Kenny, Tim Blair, Miranda Devine, Howard Sattler, Gary Hardgrave, on and on, in print and on radio. For most of them, climate change is a political issue. Anyone who doesn't scoff at the science is a left-wing dupe. Where are the well-informed, cogent, passionate voices in the mainstream media pushing the arguments being put forward in the scientific literature? Where are the George Monbiots of Australia? Pretty much non-existent. The likes of Tim Flannery and Clive Hamilton are not full-time communicators; compared to Jones and Bolt, their voices are puny. Well, it's not surprising. Of course we don't want to change our ways; of course we are easily persuaded that there's really no need, or that someone else should change first, or that, even if we do change, it will make no difference.

And so Abbott was able to spend a large part of his speech to the National Press Club on Monday railing against the carbon tax (even though an emissions trading scheme isn't a tax). How much, by 2050, it would have cost families, damaged our industries, undermined our way of life. But not a word about the potential cost of climate change itself - to tourism, to agriculture, to water security, to health, to beachside properties, to ports, to our way of life. Labor doesn't talk about that stuff either, these days. We heard it all six years ago. Alarmism. Warmism. We've moved on. And yet what hasn't changed is the scientific consensus. As our interest has waned, the scientists' warnings have become more urgent, not less; the degree of certainty that global warming is happening, and is human-induced, has increased, not diminished. Maybe the scientists are wrong. Maybe, in 20 years, people like me will be shamefacedly admitting we were duped by a conspiracy of greenies; or the scientists themselves will confess they followed the money and not the evidence. But I doubt it. Far more likely, in 20 years' time, it will be all too obvious that the science was right all along. Global temperatures and sea levels will be remorselessly rising, and it will by then be vastly more difficult and expensive to slow the process, let alone to reverse it. Many of the sceptics will be well into their 80s by then. So will I. Will they tell their grandchildren they are sorry? Will we all admit that, yes, we were warned, but around 2010 we just lost interest?