Oh, the Irony of the Backlash Against Bret Stephens

I know, I know … wallow in the irony if you must, but it’s probably best to choke back the schadenfreude. The knee-jerk impulse to attack objectionable speech appears to be spreading from college campuses to other liberal institutions, and the long-term consequences are terrifying. That’s not hyperbole. Stephens’s column was about the uses and abuses of climate change data for political ends, a worthy topic in an era in which a sitting U.S. senator, Obama’s attorney general, and the Democratic party platform have all raised the spectre of taking legal action action against climate change skeptics.

Never mind that Stephens believes in man-made climate change and said as much in his column; the knives had been out since the moment the Times announced it had hired him away from the Wall Street Journal.

Anyway, Stephens decided to lean into the controversy surrounding his hire and outlined his thoughts on the political problems created by global warming debate. He tried to make the point that the policy response has been screwed up because arrogantly insisting you’re correct, even as you make radical predictions that turn out to be true, doesn’t persuade people:

Not only is Stephens’s sentiment here the furthest thing from “denialism,” it’s common sense. (No wonder so many loyal Times readers object.) Examples of climate claims proved to be wrong haven’t exactly been rare.

In 1989, Paul Ehrlich—yes, that Paul Ehrlich, whose dire environmental predictions had already been proved wrong so many times over that it’s appalling he was still being invited on to network news—was invited on the Today Show where he went on to predict global warming would melt the polar ice caps in the next decade, and “we could expect to lose all of Florida, Washington D.C., and the Los Angeles basin … we’ll be in rising waters with no ark in sight.” And the more things change, well, the more they hand out Nobel Prizes for being wrong. Al Gore repeatedly cited research saying there was a strong likelihood that Arctic sea ice would completely melt in the next seven years … starting in 2007.

What’s really bizarre here is that so many of the people objecting to Stephens’s column are proving his point. Again, Stephens isn’t saying global warming isn’t real, just cautioning that hubris is not a good look for climate change advocates. Their arrogance is one major reason why a pretty large swath of Americans aren’t concerned about combating climate change.

Stephens’s point is pretty clear, and yet, the rap on the column is that his argument somehow amounts to a factual denial of the reality of global warming. This makes zero sense, and yet, here’s one of the New Yorker‘s august fact checkers going on a Twitter rant:

Near as I can tell, there’s not a single sentence in Stephens’s column that is factually wrong—go ahead and try and find one. (If we’re going to ding Times columnists for getting their facts wrong here, can we please talk about Thomas Friedman’s constant slobbering about China’s climate change initiatives, regardless of the fact that the Times itself reports that the Communist government is censorious and untrustworthy?) Either the New Yorker fact checker didn’t read Stephens’s column, which is likely; or he’s redefined anything that stops short of affirming worst case scenario climate change predictions as untrue, which is more likely than I’d like to admit.

That’s not the only shoddy attack on Stephens’ column. Erik Wemple is one of the more reliably honest major media critics, and yet his own column demanding answers from the Times’s editors is study in being obtuse. Here’s a list of questions Wemple thinks need answering:

1. Please condense the argument that Stephens makes in the piece.

2. The column began with a contention that the Hillary Clinton campaign screwed up its quantitative approach to campaign projections, and then used that experience as a springboard to launch into the possibility that climate science may also have such infirmities. Are you really establishing some equivalence between voter analysis and climate science?

3. Why does the column fixate on the possible future impact of climate change when your own newspaper has documented current impact?

4. Your columnist laments that advocates have stretched the boundaries of climate-change science in pushing for their agenda. 1) Examples? 2) On what public policy issue does this not hold true?

5. Your columnist makes this very erudite observation: “Ordinary citizens … know—as all environmentalists should—that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.” Could we have some such examples?

Let’s take these one at a time.

1. Condense the argument? It’s not hard—I’ve done it repeatedly here—and that’s a patronizing question.

2. Yes, insofar as both are examples of people making overconfident predictions based on unreliable and insufficient data. But Stephens’s point is that the left is failing to see the distinction between politicized subjects such as voter analysis and hard science. Recall that Huffington Post‘s polling model said Hillary Clinton had a 98 percent chance of winning. Sam Wang is Princeton neuroscience professor who likes to dabble in politics—when a neuroscience professor does polling analysis that makes it extra sciencey!—and predicted Hillary would win with a 99 percent certainty. Nate Silver was under attack in the final months of 2016 by the left for saying Clinton only had a 71 percent chance.

3. This isn’t fixation for Stephens. It’s a demonstrable observation that many dramatic climate change and environmental predictions were made in the past and simply didn’t happen.

4. Why does Stephens have have to rehash examples of abusing climate science? Plenty abound, and if you can’t think of any here, you’re probably the one in the bubble. Stephens does quote the Times‘s own environmental reporter, Andrew Revkin saying the following, “I saw a widening gap between what scientists had been learning about global warming and what advocates were claiming as they pushed ever harder to pass climate legislation.” And is the fact that science is often abused in advocacy of other public policy issues supposed to be exculpating for climate change advocates who have overstated their case? That everybody does it? Again, Stephens’s explicit point is that anytime you use claims of scientific certainty to demonize political opponents, you run the risk of setting back your own cause should those predictions not turnout to be true.

5. See No. 4.

It’s pretty clear that the attack on Stephens boils down to one thing: He’s a conservative telling liberals what they don’t want to hear, and in this case, need to hear.

Last week, Slate published a piece commenting on an interview Stephens gave to Vox. Even before the climate change column landed, the attacks on Stephens’s refusal to parrot liberal orthodoxies had begun. Here’s a snippet of what Stephens said to Vox about campus rape:

Now here’s Slate‘s Osita Nwanevu objecting:

Let’s not leave aside Stephens’s use of Africa for the purposes of comparison, because it’s a good one. In fact, let’s cite the original source: “The one-fifth to one-quarter assertion would mean that young American college women are raped at a rate similar to women in Congo, where rape has been used as a weapon of war.” That comparison, along with 11,000 or so other words blowing logical and methodological holes in alarmist campus rape stats so big we could drive the 1st Armored Division through them, was published by Emily Yoffe in the pages of … Slate.

It appears we have reached the liberal media singularity, where liberal journalists at liberal outlets can’t even abide by the range of opinion offered elsewhere in their own publications.

But this is also a good example, because it shows that the breadth of Stephens’s knowledge and reading extends to familiarity with at least one liberal media outlet that’s not normally inclined to publish stuff he agrees with.

By contrast, Stephens’s alleged “denialism” wasn’t a problem when he was writing for the Wall Street Journal, even though the Journal‘s circulation is higher and it’s an arguably more influential paper. It only became a problem for New York Times readers when they were forced to confront it. When you would rather draw a line in the sand than engage in a dialogue about a problem, well, you’re unlikely to ever fix the problem.

Indeed, Stephens’s well-crafted column is good precisely because it exposes how the people who most object to it are the ones most in need of taking it to heart. If a newspaper doesn’t publish at least one well-reasoned columnist whom most of their readers find politically disagreeable, well, it’s probably a doing its readers a disservice. Stephens’s role as a conservative columnist at a place like the Times should be to meaningfully challenge his liberal audience—otherwise, why even take the job? So far, he’s off to one hell of a good start.