What does Australian prime minister Tony Abbott really think about climate change?

Emerging from a meeting with US President Barack Obama, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told reporters he took climate change “very seriously”.

Abbott said the world should do something to cut greenhouse gases emissions, but this shouldn’t be done with policies that “clobber the economy”.

But if anyone thinks that Abbott’s “very serious” position on climate change represents even a small shift in his thinking then they’re mistaken.

Over recent years, Abbott has taken some irreconcilable positions on the science and policy of climate change. His views have changed little.

Abbott's climate battlelines

Famously in September 2009 Abbott told a Liberal Party dinner in regional Victoria that he thought the science of human-caused climate change was “crap”.

The same year, Abbott published his political autobiography Battlelines where he set out his position in more detail. His argument then was the same as it is now, when he wrote:

It sounds like common sense to minimise human impact on the environment and to reduce the human contribution to increased atmospheric-gas concentrations. It doesn’t make much sense, though, to impose certain and substantial costs on the economy now in order to avoid unknown and perhaps even benign changes in the future.

But in the same book chapter, Abbott promoted climate denialist talking points and referenced a mining entrepreneur who says climate change is all natural.

In Battlelines, Abbott wrote: “Whether humans have had a significant impact on the climate as a whole is much less clear. Climate change is a relatively new political issue, but it’s been happening since the earth’s beginning.”

Abbott wrote that “in Roman times, grapes were widely grown in Britain” and how “in medieval times, Greenland supported agriculture”.

“Of course these climatic changes had little or nothing to do with human activity,” Abbott adds.

Watchers of climate science denialist blogs will recognise these well worn talking points. Abbott was trying to post an argument that because the climate had changed before without human intervention, it can’t be changing much now because of emissions.

This was the same false logic Abbott employed a few months ago when he flat out denied any link between bushfires and human-caused climate change.

In Battlelines, Abbott concedes “carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has had some effect on climate, but debate rages among scientists over its extent and relative impact”.

Cold weather in Europe and North America had made “the concept of ‘global warming’ less plausible”, he wrote.

He added: “Perhaps this explains the shift in polemical terminology to the less prescriptive ‘climate change’.”

In fact, it was the US Republican pollster Frank Luntz who suggested to the George Bush-led administration in 2001 that the term ‘global warming’ should be replaced with ‘climate change’ because it was seen as ‘less frightening’.

Abbott quotes from a book by “Australia’s leading geologist, Professor Ian Plimer” who is a mining entrepreneur appointed in recent years as a director to the boards of several of Gina Rinehart’s mining companies.

Plimer’s stock phrase is “the climate has always changed” and he claims any observed changes are natural.

Later in the book, Abbott discusses his decision to run for the Liberal party leadership to oppose then leader Malcolm Turnbull's support for pricing greenhouse gases. He recalls a "long phone conversation" with then Senator Nick Minchin, a climate science denier.

Bad advice and bad policy

Abbott’s claim to take climate change “very seriously” is at odds with the people he has appointed to advise his government.

For Abbott, taking climate change “very seriously” apparently means appointing a climate science denier as your top business adviser and putting another sceptic in charge of a review into your country’s key renewable energy policy.

Taking climate change “very seriously” also means cutting the agency set up to drive the growth of renewable energy.

The proposed axing of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, “saving” $1.1 billion, places about 190 renewable projects worth $7.7 billion at risk, according to the agency’s chief executive.

Analysts have said Abbott’s "direct action" scheme to replace the current carbon price legislation is likely to fall several billion dollars short of achieving the five per cent cut in emissions by 2020 his government clings to.

Australia’s Climate Change Authority has described that target as “not credible” and said it should be trebled. The authority is to be scrapped.

After recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports outlined the risks of failing to rapidly cut emissions, environment minister Greg Hunt said emissions from coal burning could be captured.

Yet among the budget cuts that Abbott is trying to push through parliament is $459 million from the Carbon Capture and Storage Programme.

Key 18 months for climate issue

Abbott’s meeting with Obama might be seen as the first bookend of a key 18-month period for national and international climate change negotiations.

In September, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has invited world leaders to a New York summit to bring bold pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Abbott has said he won’t be going. He will be too busy trying to repeal the carbon price legislation and pushing his budget cuts to renewables through parliament.

At the end of this year the next major United Nations climate change negotiations take place in Peru.

The expectation, or hope, is that the Lima talks will put some flesh on the very bare bones of a new global agreement to be signed in Paris in late 2015 to cut emissions post-2020.

If the world’s climate shifts to an El Niño, as is now expected, then there is a good chance negotiators could enter those Paris talks with the sound of splintering global heat records in their ears.

What are the chances of Abbott changing his views on climate change between now and Paris?

My view. Seriously crap.