Well, it is official, Marty Rowland PhD has been fired from his position as Special Issue Editor at the American Journal of Economics and Sociology (AJES). The reason he was given for being fired was his publication of our paper, Carbon Dioxide and a Warming Climate are not problems. The paper has been cited 23 times according to google scholar. It was first published online May 29, 2024, and is already in the top 1% of all 29 million papers followed by Wiley’s Altmetric tracker. It is the #2 paper published in the 83-year history of the AJES.
Challenges (there are many from the climate mafia) to May & Crok are responded to here, see the bottom of the post for the full list and links to all peer-reviewed and informal challenges and our responses. Dr. Rowland calls his firing “Orwellian,” and we totally agree. The challenge by Tinus Pulles in an article somewhat offensively titled “Climate Denialism” cites two articles that directly compare “climate deniers” to holocaust deniers, see here for our critique of this paper. May & Crok has withstood all scrutiny to date.
The offensive and wildly inaccurate Tinus Pulles critique is the one cited by AJES board most when they explain why they fired Dr. Rowland. In addition, other board members were pressured by Wiley to write critiques of our paper, these are Cobb, 2024 and Gwartney & Lough. Both papers make the same argument that the “consensus” says climate change is dangerous so it must be so.
Pulles’ critique relies on flawed climate models (also see here and here) projections of the future. Models are not evidence:
As to so-called modeling “evidence,” it is the models that we are testing; the model results should not be confused with evidence. (Lindzen, 2012)
May & Crok focusses on the lack of any real evidence that climate change (whether man-made or natural) is dangerous, as summarized in Table 12.12 in the IPCC AR6 WGI report in Chapter 12, page 1856. Pulles admits there are no visible current dangers, but claims models predict that there will be at some unspecified point in the future. Speculation, even using models, does not counter facts and measurements.
The more formal reviews of our paper, by David Wojick, Kenneth Richard, and Sterling Burnett are all positive. In short there was no legitimate reason to fire Dr. Rowland for publishing our fully peer-reviewed, and well received, paper. The peer reviewers all had comments on our paper and every single suggestion they sent us was incorporated into the final submitted version which can be downloaded here.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member