Kevin Rudd's "passionate" outburst on climate change during an interview with the 7.30 Report's Kerry O'Brien on Wednesday night shows he's out of touch with voters as much as his temper.
In response to criticism that he lacks the political kahunas to go to a double-dissolution on climate change Rudd said professed "Penny Wong and I sat up for three days and three nights (at Copenhagen) with 20 leaders from around the world to try and frame a global agreement. Now it might be easy for you to sit in 7.30 Report land and say that was easy to do. Let me tell you mate, it wasn't".
And the tone of Rudd's voice suggests it wasn't just in Copenhagen that he was getting sleepless nights and by the emphasis he put on the word "mate" it was probably code for something else.
But the problem for Rudd is that voters clearly don't share his feigned outrage.
Results from a Galaxy poll we recently commissioned showed that 65 per cent of Australians now believe that climate change is entirely natural or the science is contestable.
Australian poll figures on this subject are not unique. A February Ipsos Mori poll from the United Kingdom saw a drop of public support for the number of people who believe climate change is "definitely" happening dropping from 44 per cent to a mere 31 per cent. And the number of people who thought concerns about climate change are exaggerated doubled from the previous year. It's probably why climate change barely factored in the UK election.
Similarly a March poll from the US found that just under half of all Americans think that the seriousness of climate change is exaggerated. And this result wasn't a one-off with the number doubting the seriousness increasing four years in a row.
But despite the current dip in support for the science of climate change, no one should doubt that the issue is going away.
Next week the conference equivalent of Mecca for climate change sceptics is being held in Chicago to address the future of climate change science and economics.
The Heartland Institute's 4th International Conference on Climate Change themed on reconsidering the economics and climate change is likely to be a balance of serious policy discussion and triumphalism from opponents of the US' cap-and-trade scheme and Australia's ETS scheme.
But sceptics shouldn't think they've slayed the climate beast for good.
In this week's budget the government included a $30 million propaganda campaign to run print, radio, television and web-based campaigns to give confidence to voters that the dodgy science in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth assessment report was just an accident.
The problem for Rudd is clearly that most voters clearly don't share his view or his passion on climate change anymore. And instead voters are reading the science of climate change with the same cynicism that they're taking to Rudd's outbursts.
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