So now I’m curious about Bret Stephens and especially about his excitingly original take on climate change, so I’ve hit the googles to learn more. David Roberts at Vox reported in May 2017 that Stephens had been hired away from the Wall Street Journal. Oh that kind of “diversity.”

Though the paper defends the hire in the name of opinion diversity, Stephens is a very familiar sort of establishment conservative — a cosmopolitan, well-educated, reflexively pro-Israel war hawk (who once wrote a column on “the disease of the Arab mind”) who thinks anti-racists are the real racists but moderates on select issues to demonstrate his independence.

Guys like that are a dime a dozen, I promise you.

Stephens is the kind of conservative writer who has feasted on easy shots at liberals for so long that he has let himself get lazy. Read his interview with Vox’s Jeff Stein, who actually pushed him a little. He says things like this:

I think Black Lives Matter has some really thuggish elements in it. Look — at the risk of being incredibly politically incorrect, but I guess that’s my job — I think that all lives matter. Not least black lives.

Oh, wow, nobody had ever said that before.  Mega diversity!

And when he discusses climate change, Stephens uses incorrect facts and terrible arguments. At a time when we desperately need a conversation about climate change more sophisticated than “is it a problem?” he makes the debate dumber.

Since the outcry that met his hiring, Stephens has tried to soften his take on climate. He told Huffington Post that he is a “climate agnostic.”

“Is the earth warming?” he asked. “That’s what the weight of scientific evidence indicates. Is it at least partially, and probably largely, a result of man-made carbon emissions? Again, that seems to be the case. Am I ‘anti-science’? Hell, no.”

As Joe Romm of Climate Progress has demonstrated, this is utterly disingenuous. Stephens called climate change a “mass hysteria phenomenon” for which “much of the science has … been discredited.” He said that people who accept climate change science are motivated in part by the “totalitarian impulse” and they worship “a religion without God.” He said “global warming is dead, nailed into its coffin one devastating disclosure, defection and re-evaluation at a time.”

What the hell kind of religion is accepting climate change science? Does he think we like what’s happening?

In a column calling climate change one of liberalism’s “imaginary enemies,” he said this:

Here’s a climate prediction for the year 2115: Liberals will still be organizing campaigns against yet another mooted social or environmental crisis. Temperatures will be about the same.

As Romm notes, the idea that temperature will be the same in 100 years is utterly ludicrous, the scientific equivalent of claiming the earth is flat.

Roberts goes through a list of annoying, familiar ploys Stephens uses.

6) Just asking questions. Why so rude?

Stephens is playing a bit part in a very, very old strategy. It goes like this:

• Q: “We’re just asking questions.”
• A: [questions answered]
• Q: “We’re just asking questions.”
• A: “Yeah, we answered those. Here’s a link.”
• Q: “We’re just asking questions.”
• A: “We answered the questions. A bunch of times. Please acknowledge our answers.”
• Q: “We’re just asking questions.”
• A: “Okay, we went back over our answers, double-checked and peer-reviewed them, compiled them in a series of reports with easy-to-read summaries, all of which we have broken down into digestible bits via various blog posts and visual aids.”
• Q: “We’re just asking questions.”
• A: “It’s beginning to seem like you don’t really care about this issue and are just jerking us around.”
• Q: “Hey, we’re just asking questions! Galileo asked questions, didn’t he? Why are you being so intolerant and rude?”

Let’s start at the beginning over and over again, every single day, ignoring what everyone has been doing and just taking step one, then step one, then step one, until suddenly the glacier breaks loose and sweeps us all away.

In all these examples, a similar theme emerges: Stephens just doesn’t seem to have thought much about climate change. He’s enacting the rote conservative ritual of groping around for some reason, any reason, to a) justify inaction and b) blame liberals, in the process saying false things and making terrible arguments.

He sounds kind of…bedbuggy, doesn’t he.