Also among the readers was a climate scientist, who in an email went on for many paragraphs challenging Stephens’s “fallacious and misleading argument.” And a priest, who told me that, unlike the others, he took it upon himself to subscribe to The Times, as a gesture of reward for letting all voices speak.

The bottom line: Few readers question the notion of having a conservative on the Op-Ed pages, with some caveats. But they thought it was a pugnacious move on Stephens’s part to choose climate change as his first target, a subject as flammable to many younger readers as the Middle East has long been to older ones.

That’s the readers’ side. Up the elevator on the 13th floor was Stephens, who sat beneath empty bookshelves in his new office. He was answering questions from readers for his next column, and was ready to take mine.

“It’s been an education,” he said of his maiden voyage into Times territory from the more conservative compound of The Wall Street Journal. “Some reader comments have been really smart and engaging,” he said, while many on Twitter, he said, have been less so. One tweet in particular left him explaining to his 11-year-old boy what it meant that someone wanted his dad “Danny Pearl-ed.”

Stephens’s view of his first column — what the takeaway was meant to be, and why he chose climate change for his inaugural piece — is vastly different from how many Times readers perceived it.

He says he chose climate not to intentionally incite anyone, but because he was being attacked on that subject before he even arrived. He felt he couldn’t dodge it. What about the assertion that his broader purpose, like that of many industries, is to stoke doubt about global warming and thus reduce the need to act?

Quite the opposite, Stephens said.

The first column was meant to recognize our fallibility. When I quoted the old Jew of Galicia, about someone who’s 55 percent right, that meant me. I am far from infallible, and I screw up all the time. I’m not offering my comments as statements of absolute truth. What I’m trying to do is offer statements about issues that matter in hopes that they approximate the truth. Just as I want to persuade readers, I understand that they might end up persuading me.

That may be where conciliation ends. From Stephens’s perspective, the gulf between his intentions and reader reaction is partly explained by how liberals tend to approach ideas with which they disagree.