The New York Times building is shown Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2009 in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
By:
April 28, 2017

Bret Stephens made his debut in the pages of The New York Times opinion section today with a column defending climate change skepticism in the face of scientific surety, a take that didn’t sit well with many of his colleagues in the newsroom.

Stephens, a 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winner who joined The Times earlier this year after critiquing Donald Trump’s presidential campaign for The Wall Street Journal’s opinion section, argued in his first column that the kind of overwhelming certainty that caused Hillary Clinton to overestimate her chances of electoral victory has crept into conventional wisdom surrounding climate science:

Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong. Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.

None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know — as all environmentalists should — that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.

After the column was published Friday afternoon (readers were alerted with a push notification), New York Times journalists began responding on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/BasseyE/status/858059706727845888

https://twitter.com/michaelroston/status/858053568326193153

https://twitter.com/tomwp/status/858052986639187969

https://twitter.com/willystaley/status/858052772524109829

https://twitter.com/zachjohnk/status/858050929425350656

https://twitter.com/SopanDeb/status/858049000968249347

https://twitter.com/BenHoffmanNYT/status/858048694737920000

https://twitter.com/tomwp/status/858061077883629568

https://twitter.com/greghoward88/status/858060860509564928

Stephens faced criticism from his new colleagues before he started at the Times. Declan Walsh, the Times’ Cairo bureau chief, objected on Twitter to the columnist’s use of the phrase “disease of the Arab mind” in a column about anti-semitic views held by Arabs.

Max Fisher, an editor and writer at The New York Times, also took issue with the phrase.

https://twitter.com/Max_Fisher/status/853696064775389186

Stephens defended the line on Twitter. Today, he noted that he has experienced bullying from critics on the left.

https://twitter.com/BretStephensNYT/status/858028193718128641

James Bennet, the editorial page editor of The New York Times and the former editor of The Atlantic, heralded Stephens’ debut in a note on the Times’ website celebrating the added diversity of opinion Stephens represents.

But, particularly during this turbulent and searching time in America and around the world, we should have the humility to recognize we may not be right about everything and the courage to test our own assumptions and arguments.

Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled James Bennet’s surname.

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Benjamin Mullin
Benjamin Mullin was formerly the managing editor of Poynter.org. He also previously reported for Poynter as a staff writer, Google Journalism Fellow and Naughton Fellow,…
Benjamin Mullin

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