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The move would further embed fossil fuels in an economy that must fully decarbonise - along with the rest of the world - by mid-century or soon after to avoid dangerous climate change.

Conservative MPs and pundits have been clamouring to pull Australia out of the Paris Climate Agreement, ignoring mounting evidence of the threat we face from more extreme weather, and soon.

Australia, year to date, is running at a record for maximum temperatures, according to the Bureau of Meteorology's ACORN-surface air temperature network.

Subtle shifts in temperature can be hard for people to appreciate. How many of us have thought the current winter seems annoyingly long as we awoke on yet another frosty morning?

Look out, though, for reports early next month that will confirm many of us have just experienced one of the mildest winters on record.

Visual aids, such the colour scales created by Ed Hawkins, a professor at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the UK's University of Reading, can help us understand how Australia has warmed.

In Australia's case, taking mean temperatures from 1910 to 2017 and mapping the coolest year (20.7 degrees) as dark blue and the hottest (23 degrees) as dark red, it should be obvious which way the mercury is trending.

As Fairfax Media reported this week, evaporation across eastern Australia is not only at record levels for the first seven months of 2018, but there's bright, unstinting daylight between the nearest rival year when it was this bad.

Fire authorities prefer not to stir alarm but they are quietly preparing for what could be a catastrophic season of bushfires in eastern states.

NSW is entirely drought-declared and the outlook is for a drier and hotter than normal spring for many areas - all this as crews have fought dozens of fires across the state even before spring arrives.

Places such as Richmond on Sydney's north-west fringe are showing vegetation moisture readings as low as the time of the last big bushfires to threaten the Harbour City.

And those readings are in late August - not December 2002 when that previous high was marked. Those conditions are true for most of the forests around Sydney.

Remember how Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg, the current environment and energy minister, told us lowering power prices had to be "the main game in town" when it came to the now defunct National Energy Guarantee?

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Robyn Eckersley, an expert in climate policy at Melbourne University, is as bemused as any that a government has again foundered on global warming.

"Everyone's fascinated by the sharpening of knives - it's all very Machiavellian," she says. "But no-one is talking about the problem of climate change.

"No one is talking about the cost not to act. If you put those in the balance sheet, you'd be absolutely daft not to take anticipatory action as fast as possible."