Moral outrage and condemnation is not the way to encourage a conversation about climate change and Australia's policy response, writes Marcus Priest.

In the lead up to the release of the most recent report of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change an information kit was sent around to environment groups by a PR firm engaged by the IPCC.

Contained in the kit was material the groups could use in their climate change campaigns including a sample opinion piece groups could submit to media organisations. According to that opinion piece the IPCC report contained important information for people "who don't like to end up in flames".

As is if to illustrate that point, within weeks large bushfires began raging throughout NSW after the second-warmest winter and then the hottest start to spring on record. And it didn't take long for some people to start pointing the finger at climate change.

Greens deputy leader Adam Bandt went one step further and attempted to link it to the new Government's plans to repeal the carbon tax.

Those statements make eminent sense to those who already understand the likelihood and intensity of such events increases as a result of climate change. But they continue a strategy that too often is counter-productive. With the election of a new Government there is a need to assess whether the traditional forms of advocacy and environmental campaigning are suitable.

The most obvious problem with Bandt's comments is that repealing the carbon price alone will do little to prevent future climate change. Much rests on what happens in China and its annual 10 per cent emissions growth, rather than a country that accounts for 1.5 percent of global greenhouse gases.

More importantly, one of the lessons of the past 10 years of the climate change debate has been the danger of making overly dramatic claims. As the IPCC report details there is a range of possible temperature increases and sea level rises. Yet too often, it is the top-end of those ranges used to underscore the need to take urgent action.

Consider for example, prominent scientist Tim Flannery's claim in 2004: "There is a fair chance Perth will be the 21st century's first ghost metropolis."

Three years later he was at it again saying: "In Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane, water supplies are so low they need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months".

Such claims have provided endless ammunition and mirth to people who seek to discredit the science of climate change. I remember speaking to one internationally respected climate change scientist who said he and his colleagues dread whenever Tim Flannery gives a speech as inevitably they have to go in afterwards and clean up.

Flannery's comments also highlight the dangers of conflating long-term climate change with short-term weather events. It is not possible to say whether one large bushfire or drought is due to climate change but only that they are consistent with a trend where such events become more probable.

Even so, Flannery's comments made at the time of the record-breaking millennial drought, helped feed public concern about climate change and acceptance of the need to introduce carbon pricing.

Yet when the millennial drought ended and public concern swung to the impact of the Global Financial Crisis, a great deal of the public momentum to introduce carbon pricing fell away.

After this time, other major weather events - the 2009 Victorian bushfires and the Queensland floods - failed to stir the same public opinion, so highlighting the dangers of basing a campaign on long-term climate change simply on short-term weather events.

Another of the problems of the climate change debate over the past 10 years has been how otherwise intelligent people become more and more entrenched in their climate scepticism as more and more scientific information about the likelihood of damaging climate change becomes available.

It is the most curious paradoxes of the whole debate. There is a seeming contradiction in the fact that those arguing most fervently against a market based mechanism to tackle climate change are those who otherwise believe markets are the best and most efficient way of dealing with social and economic issues.

In the United States, there is an increasing body of academic research that political ideology - and in particular conservative or free marketeer - is a major factor preventing acceptance of climate science.

One US study found individuals' worldviews explained individuals' beliefs about global warming more fully than any other individual characteristic; so-called "hierarchs" and individualists tend to dismiss the claim that global warming is occurring and is serious threat to our society due to the belief it would lead to a redistribution of resources, whereas egalitarians and communitarians take the opposite view.

Further, it found with increasing levels of scientific literacy, liberals ("egalitarian communitarians") and conservatives ("hierarchical individualists") become more polarised over global warming.

However, the same research showed people who endorsed free-market economic principles become less hostile when they are presented with policy responses that do not seem to be as threatening to their world view, such as geo-engineering or nuclear engineering.

In one experiment, subjects were supplied with one of two versions of a newspaper article. In both versions, a report was described as finding that the temperature of the earth is increasing, that humans are the source of this condition, and that this could have disastrous environmental economic. In one version, however, the scientific report was described as calling for "increased anti-pollution regulation", whereas in another it was described as calling for "revitalisation of the nation's nuclear power industry".

Those subjects receiving the "nuclear power" version of the article were less culturally polarised than ones receiving the "anti-pollution" version.

In a recent New Scientist article Cardiff University research associate Adam Corner said the implication of this research was that climate change communicators needed to understand that debates about the science were often simply a proxy for more fundamental disagreements.

"Too often, they assume that the facts will speak for themselves – ignoring the research that reveals how real people respond. If communicators were to start with ideas that resonated more powerfully with the right – the beauty of the local environment, or the need to enhance energy security – the conversation about climate change would likely flow much more easily."

There is some substance in that suggestion when you examine Prime Minister Tony Abbott's oft-stated views on "practical environmentalism".

In announcing his "Green Army" signature policy earlier this year he stated: "Australia has a beautiful environment and Australians want to look after it. We are all conservationists now. But as well as climate change, important though that is, we have very big environmental challenges much nearer to home, chief amongst them are our degraded land and our polluted waterways".

In other words, if people are concerned about climate change and want to convince the new government to take action now, they need to come with better and smarter ways of doing so than simply expecting moral outrage and condemnation to suffice.

Marcus Priest is a lawyer, former political adviser to Federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland and former environment writer for the Australian Financial Review. View his full profile here.