The AJES Response to May & Crok

By Andy May

The featured image is figure 2 from May & Crok.

This post is mostly a list of errors and misinformation in the AJES (The American Journal of Economics and Sociology) board’s response by Ted Gwartney and Alexandra Lough to May & Crok. But first I applaud the board’s decision to formally publish the paper they invited May & Crok to write for their special climate change edition. The paper they asked us to write (already published online) was intended to explain the science behind the “climate denial” point of view, and it accomplished that.

The paper has received a lot of criticism, see the links at the end of this post for our response to each critique. The critiques all fall into two categories:

1. May & Crok are correct that there is no sign of any unusual global danger from man-made climate change today, but just wait! The climate models say there will be dangers in the future.
2. I don’t see any errors or flaws in May & Crok or in the references, but you must be wrong because the “consensus” of climate scientists say you are wrong.

The AJES board’s criticism, by Gwartney & Lough falls in the second category. May & Crok is a straightforward and honest look at the state of climate today, and the paper simply points out, and the AR6 WGI report agrees, that there are no signs of any dangers from man-made climate change now or in the immediate future.

As the internal AJES dispute over our paper continues we are getting more information on how biased the peer-review system is. May & Crok’s invited paper passed peer review and the reviewers were very prestigious academics that have both published extensively on climate science and closely related fields. Between the two of them they have amassed more than 15,000 citations of their published work according to Researchgate. Further, the AJES special edition editor approved the paper for publication.

Now we find out that Wiley (the publishing and printing company that AJES contracts with) objected to the paper and “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 pull the 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.

However, while formally publishing May & Crok is a good thing, it does not grant Gwartney & Lough license to unfairly malign the authors of the paper or their motives. So, I put together the following list of misinformation in Gwartney & Lough. As the list of critiques and responses below the conclusions of this post shows, no errors or misinformation have been identified in May & Crok to date.

Errors and misinformation in Gwartney & Lough

Quotes from the AJES response are shown in italics and indented, my discussion of each quote is in normal type.

May and Crok “was written more in a spirit of defiance or rebellion”

We challenged the consensus climate change hypothesis, how is this defiance or rebellion? Challenging the consensus is exactly what scientists are supposed to do.

“… two authors who lack any experience publishing in scientific journals …”

A list of Andy May’s publications in many scientific journals is publicly available on google scholar. Some are also listed in other places such as Orcid (0009-0002-3452-9976) and Researchgate. He has 203 citations in google and Researchgate reports 102 citations.

A list of Marcel Crok’s publications is also available on google scholar, he has 126 citations. Marcel’s profile on Researchgate shows 76 citations of his work.

Both Marcel and Andy have a lot of experience publishing in scientific journals, this statement is clearly false.

“…normative commitment to economic growth rather than to scientific understanding.”

May & Crok addresses possible dangers due to global warming, possible additional extreme weather, and problems comparing current instrumental temperatures to past warming events. We also address the Little Ice Age, the greening Earth, and the possible effect of climate change on GDP. Economic growth is important, but it is not the only topic discussed in the paper. Again, clearly false.

“…starts with a desired outcome and works backward…”

May & Crok’s premise is that the weather today is arguably better than the weather in the Little Ice Age (aka the “pre-industrial”) and that extreme weather today has not exceeded natural variability. These two premises are backed up with numerous references including the latest IPCC report, AR6 WGI (page 1856), also see here. Where is the evidence that the conclusions, data, and references in May & Crok are incorrect? It seems the board of AJES is beginning with the premise that the consensus hypothesis is correct and working backward, the opposite of the scientific method we all learned in school. Seems like they are projecting their problem unfairly onto May & Crok.

“Normally, the governing board of AJES stays out of the content published by editors, but this case has forced us to intervene. Wiley, the publisher, rightly balked at publishing the article, given its deficiencies, and we are grateful to Wiley for forcing us to become involved.”

Who is in charge of AJES? Are you saying the board of AJES reports to Wiley? How has Wiley “forced” the board to become involved? Who appointed Wiley custodian of scientific truth? This seems upside down.

May & Crok were invited to explain the scientific reasoning behind climate denialism, the idea that global warming is not dangerous, and that humans may have very little impact on climate change. We did that. What in our article is false or in error? We disagree with the consensus view that humans cause dangerous climate change, why is there a problem with this? There is no evidence that we are aware of that climate change, whether man-made or not, is dangerous, this is also stated in AR6 WGI on page 1856 (see footnote 37 in our paper). How is Wiley “forcing” you to get involved in this issue not censorship of the worst possible kind?

“…abuse of research methods in this article.”

What abuse? What research methods? All the data used in May & Crok are publicly available and all the references are sound. This was an invited literature review/opinion article, there are no “research methods” per se, only the bibliography which I’ve never seen criticized. This is clearly a false and irrelevant comment.

“… an article that would normally be rejected…”

It went through peer review and was accepted. The two peer reviewers who accepted it are very accomplished scientists who have written extensively about climate science. Why would you say this? This is false, it clearly was not rejected, and proper peer review procedures were followed. There is no valid reason to reject it.

“At no point do they offer an alternative hypothesis to explain the unprecedented rate of global temperature increase in the past 50 years. Not only do they fail to overturn the climate consensus; they never truly question it.”

The article was written to show that the consensus hypothesis has problems. We show the hypothesis is based on faulty models and little or no evidence. This is the way science is supposed to work. Gwartney & Lough seem to think the climate consensus should be accepted blindly and not questioned, a very anti-scientific view. Gwartney and Lough write that:

“… most educated adults are only partially familiar with the hundreds of scholarly components of the climate consensus, including geology, biology, climatology, oceanography, and history. No single human could master all of those components, so understanding the future of the planet requires multiple overlapping teams of scientists to pull together disparate data and to resolve anomalies.“

This is an argument more suited to the Middle Ages than today. The idea of forbidden knowledge is a trope of horror movies and has no place in modern science. To say that the “climate consensus” is beyond normal human understanding and we should not even try to understand it is an admission the authors are out of their depth. It reminds one of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein where she writes that some knowledge is forbidden and to pursue it is death! Climate change does not fall into this category, and the modern public is not that gullible. To justify eliminating fossil fuels on the basis of science beyond our understanding is mystical nonsense and a sure sign we are being had. If climate change were truly dangerous, the reasoning could be explained clearly and succinctly.

As critics of the consensus hypothesis, we are under no obligation to offer an alternative hypothesis. May & Crok show that the warming in the past 50 years is neither unusual nor unprecedented (see May & Crok‘s figure 4). We make no attempt to “overturn the climate consensus,” but we clearly question it. This is what we were asked to do and our duty as scientists, Gwartney & Lough do not seem to understand how science is supposed to work or our mandate from the special edition editor.

“Since the ultimate focus of denialists is economic growth …”

This is the main strawman fallacy in the AJES response. No denialists that I am aware of focus on economic growth, except for economists like William Nordhaus, Richard Tol, and Bjorn Lomborg. Economics is only briefly mentioned in May & Crok.

May & Crok do recognize that economic growth is important as an indicator of human welfare and it is needed to normalize damages from extreme weather. Affluent societies are healthier, live in cleaner environments, and live longer. When they emerged in the 19th century, fossil fuels were welcomed because they improved the environment and saved the whales. May & Crok emphasize potentially dangerous extreme weather, how climate change might affect mortality, the scientific evidence for dangerous man-made climate change, and the evidence, or lack thereof, that humans influence climate change. May & Crok also critically examine the idea that current warming is unusual.

“Even if spending on mitigation (prevention of climate damage) were a waste of money, the costs of adaptation would still be enormous—trillions of dollars merely to adapt to sea- level rise by dispersing inland the population of the largest cities in the world. … Since the costs of mitigation are trivial by comparison with adaptation costs, the denialists should be ahead of the curve, focusing on developing the most efficient methods of adaptation rather than wasting their time criticizing the IPCC and its results.”

As noted in May & Crok, the current rate of sea level rise is a very modest two mm/year (also see here and here for a fuller discussion), there is no danger to coastal cities and no need to evacuate anyone. I know of no estimate of adaptation and mitigation costs that concludes mitigation is cheaper and none is cited in Gwartney and Lough. The most reliable study is William Nordhaus’ Nobel Prize winning work that shows adaptation is cheaper, at least until global average temperature warms four degrees, which is a very long way into the future, if four degrees of warming ever occurs at all. See Nordhaus’s Nobel Prize lecture here. The assumptions in this quote are clearly false and/or unsupported.

Conclusions

Science is organized debate, Wiley, Gwartney, and Lough are free to disagree with May & Crok, but they should not criticize our work without proper references or data that show we are wrong and support their assertions. Simply assuming a popular hypothesis is correct and all opposing views are wrong is egregiously unscientific and political. Further the IPCC has promoted their hypothesis that humans are the cause of dangerous global warming and climate change for over 30 years and have yet to convince the public that there is a problem. Thirty years is a long time to push a failing agenda.

Also, their use of the “economic growth” strawman is inappropriate. Economic considerations were clearly not the focus of our paper which instead focused on potential dangers to humanity from climate change. In any case, I’m happy the paper will be formally published and I’m grateful to the board for that decision.

I was a member of the publications committee for the Petrophysics Journal for a number of years in the 1990s and reviewed dozens of submitted papers. I checked the references, the math, the writing, the reasoning, and the data; and often rejected papers or ask for them to be modified for these reasons. But I never rejected a paper because I disagreed with it or it went against the “consensus.” There are serious problems with peer-review and editorial review in journals today, it is affecting the public’s perception of scientific integrity and creates a problem for all scientists. As I’ve written elsewhere:

“The peer-review process can, and often does, suppress truly innovative work. Papers are sometimes rejected simply because they are novel and opposed to the “consensus” opinion.” Andy May, see here.

Finally a personal word. Due to the overwhelming success of May & Crok (it remains in the 99.7%_ile of all 27.5 million research papers in Wiley’s database), I get a large number of requests to write more papers for various journals. It isn’t likely to happen. I reach a larger audience through my website and WUWT and have a larger impact in those forums. I’m very disappointed in today’s peer-review process and, unless it reforms itself, I doubt I will participate in it again. It seems likely that peer-reviewed journals, at least in their current form, will follow the mainstream news media and the dodo bird into oblivion.

The full submitted version of May & Crok can be downloaded here or on Researchgate.

Responses to other criticisms of May & Crok

The responses contain links to the original critiques:

1. “Bonus” Gets it wrong. A discussion of sea level, climate proxies, and “are today’s temperatures unusual?” Are deaths due to climate change declining rapidly? Does more CO₂ cause Earth to green? Are crop yields increasing? Are Marcel Crok and myself paid shills for the fossil fuel industry? Has Martin Durkin’s movie on climate been debunked? What is the trend in extreme weather?
2. All Things Equal: Is CO₂ the climate “control knob?”
3. Tinus Pulles critique of May & Crok. This is Pulles’ first attempt to critique our paper, the second will be published sometime in the future according to Gwartney & Lough. Pulles admits that there are no adverse effects from climate change today, but tells us it will be bad in the future because the climate models say so. He is concerned that the Little Ice Age did not occur everywhere in the world at the same time. He notes that log (CO₂) correlates well with global average temperature and that there is a lot of extreme weather in Europe this year.
4. Pubpeer comment on May & Crok. The anonymous reviewer calls himself or herself “Phoma destructiva.” The reviewer is upset that May & Crok underestimated anthropogenic global warming even though we offered no estimate. The reviewer also critiques future projections by the authors of two of our sources, Javier Vinós and Judith Curry, although we do not use their projections in our paper. Then the reviewer disputes the well-established existence of ocean oscillations, like the AMO and PDO. Generally, this review is an example of setting up strawmen to knock down while ignoring what May & Crok actually say.
5. Phoma destructiva’s 2nd comment on May & Crok. This is an attempt to rebut our refutation of Phoma’s first critique by using empty rhetoric, strawman, and red herring fallacies. Not much new here.
6. Comment on Cobb, 2024. The first AJES article criticizing May & Crok was by Clifford William Cobb. The paper provides a reasonable definition of “Climate Denialism” that thankfully avoids comparing us to Holocaust deniers. The paper does not address any of the scientific points made in May & Crok and simply asserts that we must be wrong because the “consensus” says so. He does attempt to blame Exxon for climate denialism, which is absurd, Exxon participated in all the IPCC reports, and has many scientists working for them that are part of the “consensus.” Cobb thinks that the May & Crok advice to only end fossil fuel use when a danger from them is identified is “start[ing] from a conclusion and working backward,” when in reality it is just common sense. He does not address the central question: “Is there any danger in man-made global warming?” Cobb bases his fact-free argument on ideology and opinion and ignores abundant evidence that addition CO₂ and global warming have been beneficial to humans to date.
7. Both Cobb and I agree that the news media are awful at reporting science. I believe that academics would best help the world by changing their writing style so their articles can be read and understood by the general public. Leave the technical details and jargon in the supplementary materials. We want the public to get their science news from primary sources, not Fox or CNN, who just screw it up.