Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the great carbon tax slayer, perhaps believed he was immune from the curse. After all, he was elected on a pledge to deliver us from the loathed tax, which was introduced on a broken promise and appeared pointless to many given the lack of any meaningful global action.

And as Abbott keeps pointing out, as if to comfort himself, his government repealed the reviled carbon tax. He killed it dead. It's over.

Except that it isn't - not as a political issue. Despite his strenuous efforts to smother it, climate change looks like it's biting Abbott on the prime ministerial bottom just as mischievously as it did his predecessors.

First, Abbott was made to look silly when the US and China announced their historic emissions-reduction agreement.

Then, the Prime Minister was gazumped by the off-Broadway climate change speech US President Barack Obama gave during the G20, which contradicted Abbott not just in general terms but in specific detail, by linking climate change to the degradation of the Great Barrier Reef and to Australia's "wildfires".