This makes it sound like believing in an uncountable ordinal is equivalent to AC, which would make things easier - lots of mathematicians reject AC. But you might not need AC to assert the existence of a well-ordering of the reals as opposed to any set, and others have claimed that weaker systems than ZF assert a first uncountable ordinal. My own skepticism wasn't so much the existence of any well-ordering of the reals (though I'm willing to believe that no such exists), my skepticism was about the perfect, canonical well-ordering implied by there being an uncountable ordinal onto whose elements all the countable ordinals are mapped and ordered. Of course that could easily be equivalent to the existence of any well-ordering of the reals.