It's a profoundly stupid column, don't get me wrong, but the NYT is one of the handful of publications actually worthy of and needing of subscribers. Hurting it with a belligerent boycott is self-defeating

Happy May Day!

I feel like you're willfully misinterpreting his position to an anti-intellectual position that you want to attack. Pointing out how disastrous the State/Science connection can be, and has been, seems prudent, especially in today's post truth/you're either with us or against us world.


The fact that liberals want to burn him/the NYT at the stake is both hilarious and troubling.

His entire point is that there's uncertainty in the climate change models, and they *could* be wrong. Ok. Now tell me the potential downsides/upsides of the following courses of action:

1) Assume man-made climate change is real. Promote renewable energy. Try to curtail/disincentivize coal/tar sands/fracking etc.

2) Do nothing until all fossil fuels are depleted, because there's a chance it might not be real.

Even the author can't say there's a better than even chance that climate change is overblown. So even if it's at 65% or something - wouldn't #1 be a much much better course of action?

What is the point of pointing out that climate models *could* be wrong - unless you're ready to assign some overwhelming odds - like 80%+ chance that they *are* wrong? This is one of those cases where human emotion/tribalism comes in and blocks a very simple logical connection imo. Oh - climate change might not be real? Whew, I don't have to worry about the world I'm leaving for my kids anymore. That sure feels better.

Very simple analogy - just replace the earth with yourself. A large % of doctors are telling you that if you don't stop some behavior you're probably going to die. Are you going to seek out a few doctors to tell you that doctors have been wrong in the past, and there's always some uncertainty, so ... do nothing?

I mean you've got these olds who have been hearing the same thing for decades now, we were going to run out of food 30 years ago, our Ozone should be gone by now, etc. They've heard hyperbole forever and have seen the "Science" be "wrong". So perhaps a different non-hyperbolic/absolutely certain/stop asking questions approach is better?

The only "willful" misinterpretation of anything is both Stephens and you pretending the column is not both implicitly and explicitly designed to argue that climate science is unreliable and that climate change is a hoax, which has been one of Stephens' projects for at least half a decade.

The New York Times deserves every ounce of scorn it gets for abandoning truth and journalistic integrity to bring in readers, while simultaneously trumpeting climate change denialism from beneath its venerated masthead. There are plenty of publications that reliably sift wheat from chaff from outright fabrication, and The New York Times is no longer one of them.

Suzz,

It seems to me like you're creating a false dichotomy in which one of the options satisfies your feelings and the other makes one look like a bad, bad person!

It is hard to argue with choosing 2 over 1, I agree.

Hoya in case you missed it, he had this to say:


I feel like that is a very important thing for proStateScience persuaders to understand, and maybe it's best to try to understand what he's trying to say opposed to assuming he's an idiot anti-science trumpkin that needs to be censored for not blindly supporting your agenda, especially when he's not even opposing it.

do I have to go copy-paste his litany of "global warming is fake" columns and various "lol at liberal hysteria, climate science is disproven" hot takes from earlier in his career to convince you that you're wrong and he's lying when he tries to soften his point, or are you capable of doing that yourself?

Who cares if climate change is not 100% certain? "Is it likely?" should be the only question.

FWIW I just googled "global warming is fake" and Bret Stephens and literally found no results or articles about him, though I did google Bret Stephens and global warming and found this from the WaPo today:

The problem with calling Bret Stephens a climate change ‘denier’

May be poor timing, but x-posting this from politics bc it speaks to how I see things going at this point and I'm curious on Hoya's take.

It seems like he's much more Anti-Agenda driven Unscientific-Science, opposed to the global warming denier people want him to be.

Wrong.

http://scienceline.org/2017/04/ice-age-never-happened/

Clearly global cooling was a farce, so we never should have cleaned up the smog. Lol dumbasses and their "sciencism". Good thing we know better now.

pathetic

Global Warming as Mass Neurosis - Bret Stephens, WSJ (2008)

From a 2009 column that has seemingly been wiped from the WSJ archives:

Liberalism's Imaginary Enemies - Bret Stephens, WSJ (2011)

I can go grab like 20 more, let me know if that's necessary.

Grandpa why did you leave me this hellish planet to live on?

Well you see Timmy, liberals were really really annoying. I mean just look at them.

...

Eh, you had to be there.

The people unsubscribing to the NY Times strictly because of that article are overreacting for sure.

The reason to unsubscribe from the NY Times is because they will hire a scumbag like Stephens and then trot out some condescending, intellectually dishonest bull**** about how it serves their readers to offer a wide spectrum of viewpoints as opinions so as to further the debate. This, of course, is rank nonsense given that they define the spectrum of reasonable debate as establishment white guys ranging from the Marco Rubio right to the Hillary Clinton left. And when readers push back, the Times trots out Washington bureau editors to condescend, mock, and insult the intelligence of readers.

Ask yourself if they would hire a minority leftist opinion writer to advance the discussion surrounding income inequality. Ask yourself if they would hire a minority non-interventionist to advance the discussion surrounding US imperialism and endless war around the world. They wouldn't. Look at this list:



The problem is that NYT creates bull**** ranges of what they consider reasonable debate and that they define objectivity as the absence of principles.

NY Times - spanning the vast spectrum from never-Trump country club republicans to neo-liberal establishment Democrats.

I mean he's not saying what you guys have said he's saying, but okay, thanks for the links.

The methods and motives behind the climate change community is something pretty interesting to follow over the decades, and he's not denying the science but acknowledging the correlation behind alarmism and funding as well as the similarities behind the methods of the movement with other more obviously oppressive movements.

That's called FUD. He's trying to create a false equivalence with the nakedly funded advocacy of the denialist crowd.

Take 2:

Grandpa why did you leave me this hellish planet to live on?

Well you see Timmy, we didn't deny the science, but focused instead on the correlation behind alarmism and funding as well as the similarities behind the methods of the movement with other more obviously oppressive movements.

...

Eh, you had to be there.

"I can't believe this idiot is saying Global Warming is Fake, i mean look here at this article where he says *magic leap of logic trick* it's a mass hysteria phenomenon, lol I hate climate change deniers so much. I'm never paying for the NYTimes again 10 years after he said that in a different newspaper that I read."

basically, yeah


LolNYT getting exactly what they deserve here

I have read the NYT nearly daily for 25 years and won't stop anytime soon, but the OpEd roster is irredeemably and inexplicably terrible in a way that defies explanation. "I wonder what David Brooks take on this current event or idea might be" is a sentence that no other human being has thought of or typed until this very post.

Thayer,

Skepticism is not the same thing as an appeal to ignorance. "What if all those experiments are wrong?" does not inherently deserve an equal place at the table as all the experiments, particularly when the doubters don't understand the science enough to generate experimental designs that might falsify the various hypotheses generated by the scientific community, and neither can they articulate an experiment that, if it were done, would satisfy them that anthropogenic climate change is real.

Furthermore, which team is doing the censorship? The scientists publishing their findings, or your beloved Trump administration that has wiped all mention of climate change from all government websites and publications?