By Andy May
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.
It appears that firing Dr. Rowland was a purely political act and not based on any legitimate problem with our paper, which is solid as far as anyone knows at this time. His firing for publishing a skeptical article is reminiscent of Wolfgang Wagner resigning over a perfectly reasonable, but counter to the “consensus” paper, by Roy Spencer and William Braswell in 2011, the paper is here and the story is here. As in this case, Spencer and Braswell presented solid observations and facts, and their critics presented model results. If you have trouble downloading the editor’s reasons for resigning from Roy Spencer’s blog, here is another link to his explanation.
The debate between the two sides is complex, and mostly is over the sign and magnitude of feedbacks to greenhouse gas (mainly CO2) warming. This is how science is supposed to work. When an editor proclaims from on high that one well supported opinion is wrong and the other is correct, without proper discussion and debate, it is politics not science.
Willie Soon and Dick Lindzen report that two editors were fired for publishing two of Lindzen’s papers. The first, published in 1990, lays out Lindzen’s objections to the idea that a man-made enhanced greenhouse effect could be the dominant reason behind current warming, the paper is quite reasonable and certainly not a reason to fire anyone. The paper warns, as we do in ours, that more definitive evidence of the potential dangers of man-made global warming must be found before drastic actions, like eliminating fossil fuels, are taken. Model results are not evidence.
The second is Lindzen’s landmark first paper on the Iris Effect. Now, more than 20 years later, the Iris Effect is widely accepted and when incorporated in models it moves model results closer to observations. Certainly, accepting such a landmark paper is no reason to fire anyone. Journalist Tilak Doshi was fired from Forbes for defending J. D. Vance’s views on the dangers of climate change. Dr. Rowland’s firing is not unique by any means.
One must remember that Albert Einstein’s PhD thesis was originally rejected until he submitted his work to Max Planck at the Annalen der Physik. Planck published most of the thesis as four papers, without formal peer-review and Einstein’s reputation was made. Max Planck said that publishing risky papers is important, it is far worse to reject a possibly groundbreaking work. The peer-review process can, and often does, suppress truly innovative work, simply because it is novel and opposed to the “consensus” opinion.
Dr. Rowland invited me to explain the scientific basis for the “denier” (or skeptical) view that man-made climate change and carbon dioxide emissions are not dangerous. It was incorporated into a special issue of AJES that covers all the views on climate change to help the public understand the full range of views on man-made climate change. This laudable attempt to examine man-made climate change from all sides in one issue of AJES is what got him fired.
Wiley, which is the publishing and printing company that AJES contracts with, objected to May & Crok and, according to Gwartney and Lough, “forced” the AJES board to “intervene” after May & Crok was already published online. Who appointed Wiley to be the judge of “truth” in science? Aren’t scientific hypotheses, such as the consensus hypothesis that man-made climate change is dangerous, supposed to be debated among scientists until all objections and contradictions are explained and all agree? Fortunately, the board, quite properly, rejected Wiley’s request to retract our paper from the issue. Science is based on free speech and debate and if only one side of an issue gets published, there can be no debate and science dies.
I asked Marcel Crok to help me write the paper because he has thoroughly researched the impacts of climate change presented in AR6 WG2. Our paper supports the skeptical view that fossil fuel CO2 emissions and climate change are not dangerous. Thus, it is both an opinion piece and a literature review paper. We avoided all speculation and deliberately used no models or model results in the paper, only accepted peer-reviewed literature and observations. The elements Wiley and AJES require to retract a paper have not been met, as a result the AJES board quite correctly rejected the Wiley request. However, they volunteered to publish Pulles, Gwartney & Lough, and Cobb’s critical papers. But, as noted above, the critiques are all based on “consensus” opinions and model results, so they are very weak.
When Dr. Rowland inquired about why he was being fired for simply publishing the full range of views on the scientific topic of dangerous man-made climate change, he was told there was only one legitimate view of climate change, that it is dangerous. When Dr. Rowland correctly pointed out that the climate establishment and the IPCC have not identified any current climate change dangers, he was told that the IPCC is withholding conclusive evidence of the dangers from the public. That they have secret data showing that it is dangerous. Dr. Rowland asked why they are keeping such important data secret and received no answer. My view is if anyone believes that is true, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I will happily sell to you. One is reminded of John Stuart Mill’s words:
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859
Besides his now terminated position of special issues editor for AJES, Dr. Rowland is a lecturer at the Henry George School of Social Science, a New York City Parks environmental engineer, and on the Board of Trustees for the Henry George School of Social Science. Losing this job is not a crisis for Dr. Rowland, as much as it is a crisis for science and the freedoms of speech and the press.
Science is never only one opinion, science is never settled, and science dies when all views are not aired in the open and freely discussed and debated. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Dr. Rowland’s idea to publish all well-documented views on climate change in one issue is a good one, that is real science. Firing him for doing this is unscientific in the extreme and a crime against free expression everywhere.
The original purpose of the AJES, when it was created 83 years ago, was to offer a “periodic, systematic synthesis of investigation of social issues” according to Dr. Rowland. This is exactly what he was trying to do since modern “climate science” no longer has much to do with science, it is now a social and political issue. The fact that Dr Rowland was fired for publishing our paper simply underscores that point.
For more on censorship and suppression of proper science, see here.
Bibliography
Cobb, C. W. (2024). The politics of climate denialism and the secondary denialism of economics. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology. doi:10.1111/ajes.12606
Gwartney, T., & Lough, A. (2025). AJES Board Response to an Internal Controversy About Climate-Change Denial. Am J Econ Sociol, 84. doi:10.1111/ajes.12609
Lindzen, R. (1990, March). Some Coolness Concerning Global Warming. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 71(3). Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/26227522
Lindzen, R., Chou, M.-D., & Hou, A. (2001, March). Does the Earth have an Adaptive Iris. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 82(3). Retrieved from https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/82/3/1520-0477_2001_082_0417_dtehaa_2_3_co_2.xml
May, A., & Crok, M. (2024, May 29). Carbon dioxide and a warming climate are not problems. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 1-15. doi:10.1111/ajes.12579
Pulles, T. (2025). Climate Denialism. AJES, 84. doi:10.1111/ajes.12611
Spencer, R., & Braswell, W. (2011). On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance. Remote Sensing, 3(8). doi:10.3390/rs3081603
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