Bret Stephens, the neoconservative columnist recently poached from The Wall Street Journal by The New York Times, made a big show of appearing reasonable in his debut op-ed last week, “Climate of Complete Certainty.” His point, he writes, “isn’t to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences.” Rather, it’s to condemn the prevailing certainty that climate change will prove catastrophic and that immediate action is warranted: “Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.”

Stephens’s column is also a (very) thinly veiled attack on liberal elites, which, given the rise of Bernie Sanders, is perhaps the most reasonable political opinion a mainstream media columnist could have in 2017. Stephens compares the certainty of environmentalists to the certainty of Hillary Clinton supporters last year, and positions himself as a populist advocate for the common man. He writes that “ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism,” adding, “Perhaps if there were less certitude about our climate future, more Americans would be interested in having a reasoned conversation about it.”

But the main reason Stephens’s column may seem reasonable—at least to the “ordinary citizens” he hopes to reach—is because it avoids obvious absurdity. He doesn’t argue that the mere existence of cold weather disproves global warming trends. He doesn’t claim that global warming is a “hoax” invented by the Chinese. He doesn’t say that climate change can’t exist because God would never allow us to be so powerful. He’s simply asking questions.

Stephens even insists he’s trying to help solve climate change. “[O]ne point of the column was to help the climate-advocacy community improve the quality of its persuasion,” he told CNN’s Dylan Byers. In response to comments from Times readers, Stephens called for more climate research and investment, in contrast to President Donald Trump’s efforts to gut science funding: “We should continue to invest in fundamental climate research and promising clean-tech, and we should redouble our investments in proven non-carbon energy sources, particularly next-gen nuclear power.”

But it is the apparent reasonableness of Stephens’s arguments that makes them even more dangerous than those of snowball-wielders like Senator James Inhofe. What Stephens is doing is still a form of climate-change denial, just stealthier. And his faux-evenhandedness has earned him a major platform from which to push bad-faith, misleading interpretations of the science, providing intellectually lazy excuses for America to keep kicking the can down the road while the planet slowly burns up.