‘Orwellian’ firing at the American Journal of Economics and Sociology for publishing a climate skeptic paper
9 hours ago Andy May
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.
Figure 1. The Altmetric ranking of May & Crok, 2025 as of 8/17/2025, the online publication date was 2024.
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:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/08/17/an-orwellian-firing-at-the-american-journal-of-economics-and-sociology/
