Politicians will say and do a lot of things they don’t really believe in order to get elected.

Take John Howard. In late 2006, trailing in the polls, and with community concern about climate change high, he reversed his government’s long-standing sceptical stance about action on global warming and announced a taskforce to look at how Australia could implement an emissions trading scheme.

“I think it is important to keep the challenge of climate change in perspective,” he said at the time. “…although I have been accused and continue to be accused of being somewhat of sceptic on the issue, the truth is I’m not that sceptical, I think the weight of scientific evidence suggests that there are significant and damaging growths in the levels of greenhouse gas emissions and that unless we lay the foundation over the years immediately ahead of us to deal with the problem, future generations will face significant penalties and will have cause to criticise our failure to do something substantial in response.”

And in June 2007, announcing the details of the scheme he intended to introduce by 2011 if re-elected, he said: "Being among the first movers on carbon trading in this region will present new opportunities for Australia. And we intend to grasp them."

But in a speech in London on Tuesday night Howard made it clear he actually didn’t think there was anything really “significant” or “damaging” about greenhouse emissions and that his last-minute policy had been mainly about grasping the tide of public opinion, rather than any opportunities from emissions trading.

“The most recent IPCC report has produced a grudging admission that the warming process has been at a standstill for the last 15 years”, he said, in a speech claiming climate change had become an “substitute religion” for those advocating government action.

So why did he not say so at the time?

“In 2006 my government hit a ‘perfect storm’ on the issue. Drought had lingered for several years in many parts of eastern Australia, leading to severe restrictions on the daily use of water; not for the first or last time the bushfire season started early; the report by Sir Nicholas Stern hit the shelves, with the author himself visiting Australia, and lastly the former US vice president Al Gore released his movie An Inconvenient Truth. To put it bluntly ‘doing something’ about global warming gathered strong political momentum in Australia.”

Howard was full of praise for Tony Abbott for challenging what had “seemed to be the consensus” on the issue, saying – with a clear sense of approval – that Australians had now “settled into a state of sustained agnosticism … Of course the climate is changing. It always has. There are mixed views not only about how sustained that warming is – seemingly it has not warmed for the last 15 years, and also the relative contributions of mankind and natural causes.”

Abbott seems to have learnt from Howard’s experience of digging in, only to be forced into a policy reversal when he found himself on the wrong side of public opinion. He does not fight the issue head on, not any more anyway, but rather tells us he accepts that the climate is changing and that “strong action” is needed.

But he claims to have found an almost painless solution. After almost four years talking up the costs of Labor’s proposed emissions trading scheme – he is still not responding to the conclusion reached by many experts, modellers, and even government departments, that his Direct Action scheme will cost more to reach even Australia’s minimum target and has no hope of making deeper cuts over time. But he and his minister reassure us that it will work, and for most people the debate about the details becomes impossibly complicated.

Abbott did, however, respond very vigorously to the suggestion that there was a link between climate change and an increased risk of bushfires.

The link – obviously not between one particular fire and climate change, but rather between an increased prevalence of bushfire weather and climate change – is accepted by the Department of the Environment, the chief scientist, the Bureau of Meteorology, the climate council, the peak body for fire and land management, the Australian Academy of Science and many other bodies. But when it was suggested by Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change, Abbott said she was “talking though her hat” because there had always been bushfires in Australia.

And in his speech Howard took up the same theme, saying Figueres was among the “alarmists” who had tried to “exploit the fires for the purposes of the global warming debate”.

As proof, he pointed to a painting by William Strutt – which just happened to feature in Edmund Capon’s wonderful Art of Australia series at about the same time – of a fierce fire that had burned Victoria 163 years ago, clearly implying that the existence of a bad fire in 1851 somehow logically refutes the contention that there might be an increased prevalence of bushfire weather now.

Howard was forced to, at least temporarily, disavow his personal agnosticism by public opinion, which had been influenced by recent weather events. Neither he nor Abbott wants another “perfect storm” to overwhelm the new Coalition government’s climate strategy with demands that it “do something” too.