Don’t the Australian denialist right just love the Global Warming Policy Forum, the venue for Tony Abbott’s now notorious “climate change is good” speech. The private body, spun off from UK “charity” the Global Warming Policy Foundation, after the latter nearly lost its tax-deduction status, was founded by former UK Tory chancellor Nigel Lawson, whose discredited book on climate change has become a black bible for the denialists. John Howard spoke to the GWPF four years ago, and it was there that he revealed that he’d been lying about his beliefs about climate change while in politics. The Rodent had announced “significant measures” on climate change, in 2007, as the election loomed. In 2013, he “recanted”:

“Mr Howard said his government proposed a carbon emissions trading scheme in 2006 in the face of a political ‘perfect storm’ on the issue.

Now the ‘high-tide of public support for over-zealous action on global warming has passed’, he said.

He said it was unlikely there would ever be a global agreement on climate change action.”

In his speech to the GWPF, Abbott rattled through the same arguments: climate change a new religion, science not settled, alarmism, etc. The Mad Monk added, for good measure, that climate change might actually be good, because peoples get cold.

Do people like Abbott and Howard actually believe that climate change is happening, is potentially catastrophic — as the near-unanimously accepted model tells us — and are determined to advance a denialist agenda anyway? There are some in the denialist movement of that stripe, but I don’t think they fit the profile. That is not out of any superior virtue. But you have to be radically evil to be that destructive, to believe in nothing but destruction for its own sake. Howard and Abbott believe in their own politics, and that shapes their denialism.

[Tony Abbott’s 17 different core climate change beliefs]

No, their attitude is delusional, but it’s a sort of functional delusion, with a shared base, but different stylings, based on their different religious-cultural heritage. It’s an object-lesson in how ideology works: you don’t just assert something as true, you find an abstract, systemic argument for why it’s true. So, if the specific science tells us disastrous-to-catastrophic climate change is happening, you go to the more general idea of “proof”, advance an absurd standard — there is no 100% proof in science — and then claim it hasn’t been met.

There, the responses diverge. Howard, the suburban Anglican-Methodist, then advances a sort of “aw shucks, I reckon” approach — the sort of “common sense from an Earlwood businessman” letter to the paper sort of thing, saying that he “had an instinct” that the “alarmist” (i.e. forecast) changes were simply incorrect.

It’s funny, when one hears Howard speak like that, you get a real flash of Norman Bates, dressed in his mother’s clothes, telling himself to be a good boy. For John Howard, born in 1939, a twentysomething in the rock’n’roll years, channels an older style of subjectivity, the sort of pre-’60s, pre-Freud, type of absolute concrete beliefs, and an unshakeable ability to believe what they reckoned without question. It’s a literalism born of fixed class and culture.

When Howard speaks in such terms, he reminds me of my late grandmother, born 1906, who could swear blind she’d never met people there were photographs of her with, refused to believe people ate squid as a food, even when she saw them doing it, and that she had never said terrible, shrewish things she’d said the day before. “I’m not the sort of person who would say things like that,” she’d say, primly, lips pursed.

She’d really believe it too. Absolutely. That’s how almost everyone thought before a certain mark in the century. That’s why basic psychoanalysis spread so rapidly through popular culture: it was a simple tool to get out of the madness of rigid thinking that was a product of modernity. It’s one of the things satirised in Dame Edna Everage, the serenely self-maintained lack of any doubt or reflection whatsoever. John Howard is Dame Edna in drag, and to hear him on climate change — or on same-sex marriage for that matter — is to hear Mrs Howard, Earlwood petrol-station matriarch, with firm opinions, and “practical common sense”.

Tony Abbott marshals many of the same arguments, but where Howard plays the practical type, Abbott cuts with the grain of his own religious tradition, wilful absurdity as a test of faith. Thus it is not that scientists’ claims are merely exaggerated; they are like “primitive people [who] once killed goats to appease the volcano gods“, says a man who believes that the one god of the universe incarnated himself in a small corner of it, and had himself nailed to a piece of wood to atone for the sins against him of the species he’d created, an act commemorated by dry biscuits and wine becoming flesh and blood in your mouth each Sunday. Who these primitives, white man?

Abbott’s speech to the GWPF had all his distinctive hallmarks: the maximum wreckage inflicted on coherent Coalition policy on the off-chance he’ll get a second chance amid the chaos, together with a sycophantic attitude he takes on when he’s speaking to a crowd he wants to please. The latter habit was presumably developed from being one of B.A. Santamaria’s last generation of young-bloods, the mini-chains of deranged logic, and a nihilistic lack of concern for the things of this world.

[Rundle: Tony Abbott, Australia’s most powerful sycophant]

That latter insouciance is part of the Catholic consolation about the things of this life. Abbott has to wake up every morning and realise that his life is something of a cosmic joke, focused on an ambition achieved, which then revealed to him that his very essence could be summed up as being someone with no aptitude to make successful that ambition in the first place. God is Love, but God is also an Arsehole Boyfriend. I doubt that Abbott imagines that catastrophic climate change fulfills the prophecies of the Book of Revelation (as do some dissident evangelicals); I just suspect that sometimes he wouldn’t mind dying, and he wouldn’t be unhappy if the rest of the world went with him, punishment for ordaining that his life have turned out to be a sort of rectal prolapse of all that was promised to him. When you imagine that level of rage, the “climate change is good” speech makes perfect sense.

These are the people we’re dealing with. The answers to their meta-arguments on the science are easy. They call on “common sense” to “refute” the idea of catastrophe within this century. But “catastrophe” is simply a closed system producing within itself, system-destroying processes. Catastrophes happen all the time. The body is a system. Cancer is its system catastrophe, auto-generated by the processes that ordinarily reproduce it. When one of those primitives who spent 20 years worshipping oncology at medical school tells you you’ve got it, you may get a second or third opinion, but you don’t get 97 of them, and then, the 98th saying it’s indigestion, refuse treatment. Instead, you accept painful and damaging chemo/radiotherapy that takes you far further “backward” than any genuine climate change repair regime would. If you don’t, then the catastrophe occurs. If Howard or Abbott or the people they love contract the start of such a system catastrophe, you can bet they’ll abandon their “100% proof” model, and their “instinctive doubt” pretty damn quick.

Will we still have climate change deniers of this style in 15 years? In 25? My suspicion is that we won’t, save as a very small minority. Just as, at some point in the 1990s/2000s, the understanding of the “environment” went from being a sort of side-chamber of life, compared to the great hall of the economy, to being something that the economy depends on, so too there will be a second categorical change, in which it will become a feature of general understanding and policy, that the economy is simply a subsidiary process of the environment, understood as a general system of life and reproduction. State and economic management will then be measured by a set of qualitative and particular input and output measures, with the quantitative subsystem — the market — entirely subordinated to those input-output settings. That will be enforced by great powers not out of altruism — it will be enforced so that, for example, 200 million Bangladeshis do not march north into China, out of uninhabitable thirst-lands, having absolutely nothing to lose.

[Rundle: why climate change activism has failed (and how it can be saved)]

When that new threshold is crossed, the denialists of today will look to us like defenders of racial segregation and subjection do — champions of an utterly morally discredited belief, lacking even the consolation that their noble loss had contributed something to a new society. And yes, I know that Nazis are back, actual Nazis. But though many people have become, say, anti-immigrant, nativist, even white/Western supremacist, the hardcore exterminatory racialist biologism hasn’t returned as mass belief. And before the Second World War, in various forms, it was an acceptable, even not-uncommon opinion.

Presuming the crossing of that second threshold as likely — because if not, we are heading to global barbarism, and war on a species-wide self-exterminatory scale — how does that steer the strategies one might apply to Howard, Abbott, et al, now? I suspect that it is not the taking-on of excessive politeness and gentle debunking that many have applied to Abbott in recent days. Though one understands this approach, and though every tactical decision is in the moment, it may well be the time to lead with the strongest trump, and begin by saying that such people are just fucking liars.

They are just fucking liars.

They know how science works, they use science every time they get a prescription filled, they know that catastrophic results are possible, and global-disastrous results probable. They just don’t care. They would rather see the planet burn than admit that the green/environmental movement was right. Call them nihilists, call them self-delusional, self-indulgent, in upmarket settings. But always and everywhere call them what they are: fucking liars who would rather we all burn than they concede. I wonder if that would hurry us on a little to the next threshold? At the very least, it would be the truth.