Australia is moving back into Howard's discredited world of ''the jury is still out on global warming''. Something more than a discredited greenhouse mafia must be at work here: a wider inability by politicians and industry stakeholders to confront uncomfortable truths.

Thus, Paul Kelly on ABC Television's Insiders of September 7 says, ''the debate in Australia is now over, and anyone seeking an Australian emissions reduction target higher than 5 per cent or 10 per cent lives in a fantasy world''. Australian Industry Group chief executive Heather Ridout warns of up to one million lost jobs in Australia if Garnaut's scaled-back target of between 5 and 10 per cent emissions reduction by 2020 is exceeded. AIG also opposes a national target of 20 per cent of energy from renewable sources by 2020, supporting continued dominance of coal-sourced energy.

Neither Kelly nor Ridout bother to debate the scientific evidence. They simply ignore it.

The same familiar climate change sceptics are running public interference. A conference in Canberra this week offered the same siren song to those who, fearing to face climate change realities, take refuge in specious pseudo-scientific sloganeering.

As Clive Hamilton wrote, for non-scientists it becomes a matter of whom you want to believe: real authorities like James Hansen of NASA, one of the world's most respected climate scientists, former eminent CSIRO scientists like Graeme Pearman and Barrie Pittock, and Government advisers like Sir Nicholas Stern and Ross Garnaut with their access to massive research resources; or do you accept views of people like Bob Carter and William Kininmouth?

Or do you, like Kelly and Ridout and perhaps Rudd and Wong too the latter have not yet declared their full hand simply shrug off such scientific ''argy bargy'' as irrelevant to their world of day-to-day politics and economic management?

Rudd, an intelligent and well-read man, must know about the increasing risks of catastrophic climate change. He sees it coming. Yet he leans to the traditional politician's approach of split-it-down-the-middle-and-see- what-happens. Of course, Rudd being of middle age probably won't be around when the Hawkesbury and Brisbane and Yarra and Swan river basins submerge, making millions of Australians homeless. But one would think he had the moral empathy to imagine that coming.

Yet it looks as though the convenience and comfort of short-term thinking will prevail, under Rudd as under Howard, and despite Stern's and Garnaut's valiant efforts to convey unpalatable scientific truths to the world of politics.

Under Rudd and Wong, policy will continue to be too little, too late. ''Apres moi, le deluge'' a cynical Louis XV had our democratic society's unwillingness to confront environmental realities down to a T.

Tony Kevin is a Canberra writer.