Australia: "Climate change advocates will look back on the second half of the noughties the same way the cast of Friends remember the '90s - as a golden era."

Lachlan Harris on why Tony Abbott has missed the tide turning in favour of the mining tax | thetelegraph.com.au

On the other side of the tidal chart are two topics of debate where public support is most definitely falling. The first is Afghanistan, the second climate change.

...Which brings us to climate change. Of all the swings in public opinion we have seen in recent years, few have been as noticeable as the swing against climate change. If the mining tax is an idea whose time has come, climate change is an idea that has extremely tough times coming. Climate change advocates will look back on the second half of the noughties the same way the cast of Friends remember the '90s - as a golden era.

There is a whole raft of complex factors that contributed to this period of climate change dominance, but the main one was simple - in Australia it just stopped raining.

Many climate change activists seem shell-shocked by the current brutality and personal nature of the climate change debate. What they don't realise is the uncontested dialogue they enjoyed in 2006 and 2007 was the statistical bleep, now is just normal.

The slow unwinding of support since then is not a disastrous collapse in public support; it's just a return to normality. Climate change is a battle between the cost of acting (felt immediately), and the cost of not acting (felt in the decades ahead). In any public debate, and in most personal financial decisions, an immediate cost trumps a future cost, so this return to tit for tat political trench warfare is not surprising. That more than 50 per cent of people still support action on climate change is an impressive outcome, keeping it there is the challenge climate change bulls must meet.