The Sydney Morning Herald's Paul Sheehan changes his mind?

Interesting times I think.

The intellectual climate about climate change is in a state of flux and at last the debate we needed to have about this is going to take place, despite the strident efforts of the Greenshirts to choke it off before it began.

And what an effort it has taken. People daring to question the loud voices screaming alarm and Armageddon and ask inconvenient questions have been subject to the most appalling abuse and character assassination.

Thuggish efforts to compare them to Holocaust deniers, false accusations of being in the pocket of Big Oil and snide dismissal as flat earthers have been only some of the ad hominem attacks designed to invalidate the questioner, but never to actually answer the questions raised.

Indeed, it was always about diverting attention from the questions.

But the questions never went away and the manifest weaknesses of the "catastrophic" climate change position remained for those prepared to look at the evidence with an open mind.

Again, this isn't to say that the climate isn't changing or that it wont have significant effects in the future to which we will have to adapt. However, change is what the climate does. Always and forever.

So Paul Sheehan's preparedness to at least admit that his views on climate change may be wrong, in a very positive review of geologist Ian Plimer's new book Heaven and Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science, is possibly significant.

The Zeitgeist is always a difficult beast to read, but given that it has been mentioned elsewhere, (and this has been my impression too), that the number of sceptical comments left in response to climate stories online has increased and young comedians like Arj Barker openly talk about the influence of the Sun on the Earth - "all I'm saying is, when I burn my toast, I don't blame the bread" - you can't help thinking it is in the process of shifting.

Hat tip to Andrew Bolt