So I’m sitting at dinner and my host decides to spark conversation with a blanket denial of global warming. Needless to say, this is not a conversation that I am used to having. Then again, it is not every evening that I am sitting across the table from an extremely wealthy, elderly, intelligent, conservative libertarian bachelor with a flair for provocation and not-entirely-pleasant self-confidence. Maybe he was worked up from our squash games at the Union Club – the second-oldest private club in the United States – where he had to buy me a set of “whites” to wear before I could go on the squash court (my plebeian pink polo was not up to code). This fellow is an interesting character: heir to wealthy Southern Jewish investment bankers whose fortune stretches back to share cropping and Reconstruction, practicing lawyer whose clients have included post-Soviet oligopolies, and confidant of conservative power players and GOP leadership. His worldview rationalizes his social status: he unapologetically parks his beliefs at his own station.

While I had rather enjoyed our prior meeting and the hours of arguing about core political principles and ideological frames for analyzing policy that ensued over a dinner of coq au vin followed by cigars and cognac back at his Upper East Side bachelor pad (complete with burgundy-walled den with built-in hard-wood bookcases, studded-leather couch, chaise and bar), his challenge to climate orthodoxy made me cringe, roll my eyes and squirm in my seat a bit. I just didn’t know if I had the patience for such dialogue between bites of otherwise-delicious saag paneer. And frankly I immediately doubted the rationality of my interlocutor. He had seemed a learned man with a strident ideology with which I disagree. With one (pseudo)scientific conjecture he became a dogmatic anti-realist nut-job fundamentalist.