I still think I see this issue a bit differently from how you do. I’m not a regular NYT reader. (I almost never use up my monthly allotment of 10 “free” articles.) But I appreciate you clarifying what you mean.

As you may know, I’m quite willing to talk about the dangers of overweening scientism and about the sometimes troubled fit between scientific knowledge and public policy. The problem with Stephens’ one column here is that he makes the point and applies it in a bizarrely specific way, and with an essentially inaccurate and manipulative invocation of “probability” against other things which are certain. It reminds me very much of how creationists manipulate the word “theory” to try to convince people that evolution isn’t really a “fact”. Either his point about probability and certainty applies to virtually everything we do that’s rests on some theory of near and medium-term trends and predictions, not just to climate change, or it has to argue that the probabilities of climate change specifically are far more tentative than almost anything else in scientific or social scientific knowledge. Neither of which he does.

If you want a sense of why I’m sure this kind of tendentious, manipulative junk is a habit with him, try this: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/26/15413718/bret-stephens-new-york-times

My knee jerks in the direction of being sympathetic to Stephens’s argument against an “overweening scientism.” So perhaps I should be suspicious of my own motives here. And I’ll concede two points regarding Stephens. 1) That op-ed is the only thing I’ve read and therefore I might be missing a context here. 2) I imagine that a good number of actual denialists engage in the “I’m not a denialist, just someone who questions the extremists.”