Bret Stephens Gives Climate-Change Alarmists Advice, and the Left Erupts

[Valin]

National Review

His first column for the New York Times elicits shrieks of ‘Denier!’ and ‘Shut up!’

Kyle Smith

May 1, 2017

 

Ordinarily when war breaks out between the activist Left and the New York Times, the conservative impulse is not to delve too deeply into the substance of the dispute but rather to inquire about the availability of refreshments: When the Ayatollah and Saddam go to war, what is there to do but put one’s feet up and enjoy the carnage?

I invoke Islamism advisedly. After Bret Stephens, the Times’ new conservative op-ed columnist, made the mild-mannered and more or less inarguable point that there are details unsettled within the topic of climate change, his many ideological opponents reacted with a mindless fury characteristic of religious zealotry. Someone tweeted at Stephens that he should share the fate of Daniel Pearl, like Stephens a longtime Wall Street Journal writer, who was denounced for being Jewish and beheaded by men acting in Allah’s name. The web of ties between ordinary global-minded progressives and jihadists grows ever more dense: For both groups, American conservatives pose the principal threat to their goals.

 

(Snip)

 

Stephens’s perfectly reasonable column amounted to friendly strategic advice for the climate alarmists: “Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts,” he noted, and he was immediately treated as a deplorable imbecile. Think Progress compared him to a Holocaust denier and a KKK official. Nate Silver, whose reputation for being a dispassionate data nerd increasingly seems endangered, denounced the column with a barnyard epithet and posted a tweet in which a Times billboard advertising “Truth” was (sarcastically) juxtaposed with a quotation of Stephens’s unassailable point that “claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science.” “Classic climate change denialism,” thundered Slate. “Climate denial wouldn’t get past my desk,” a New Yorker fact-checker tweeted, as if Stephens denied there is a climate. (Stephens also said human influence on global warming was “indisputable.”) The Guardian, as ever the most grievously wounded of them all, called Stephens a “hippie puncher.”

(Snip)

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

HuffPo: New York Times Readers Are Canceling Subscriptions Over Climate-Denying Writer

 

 

[clearvision]

 The tolerant left...

[Valin]

Meanwhile Over At HuffPo

 

 

 

[Valin]

Sulzberger’s apology

Scott Johnson

May 13 2017

 

At Politico, Hadas Gold reports that New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. is making a personal appeal to subscribers who canceled because Bret Stephens transgressed some tenet of the religion of “climate change” (f/k/a “global warming”) in his debut as a Times columnist. Say it ain’t so, Pinch!

Sulzberger’s apology reiterates the adherence of the Times’s to every jot and tittle of the faith as well as the Times’s commitment to continued evangelization. Have no doubt! I thought some readers might be interested in taking a look at the whole thing. Here is the text of the email message Sulzberger sent out yesterday afternoon to readers who cited Stephens as the reason for canceling their subscriptions (internal links omitted, whole thing with links posted here, via Chris D’Angelo/Huffington Post):

 

(Snip)