Climate Change: Will the Real Skeptics Please Stand Up? | ThinkOrSwim (the Climatechange.ie Blog)

Pigliucci clearly thinks he is wrong, but his own ideology comes through most strikingly when he defends Gore against the charge of hypocrisy for his high-energy lifestyle while telling the rest of us we must cut back on everything to save the planet: “Gore pays for offsets to his travels in order to achieve a zero-carbon balance, just as he encourages the readers of An Inconvenient Truth to do.”

This is surely a joke. The idea of offsetting is absurd, at least on an individual basis for the rich, given the narrative Gore has created of saving the planet at all costs. Pigliucci misses here how such an approach will inevitably feed the suspicions that this whole climate change thing is really a thinly veiled front for furthering the pre-existing environmental agenda of controlling people’s personal lifestyles. It is that much more than attempts by Lomborg or other, more extreme skeptics such as Monkton to “confuse the public” that is leading the climate change movement to lose ground.