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‘Shut out’: Journal fires editor after publishing research refuting ‘warming climate’

By Gabriel Zylstra – The College Fix – September 17, 2025

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology recently removed special editor Marty Rowland from his position for publishing a paper refuting climate change argument about carbon dioxide, according to the paper’s authors.

“The standard response of the mainstream climate science community these days to papers that somewhat challenge the CO2-is-dangerous-narrative is to immediately ask for retraction,” Marcel Crok, a co-author of the paper and director of the climate science group Clintel, told The College Fix.

“It’s a strategy because it gives the signal that the paper is really bad and most people don’t have the time and knowledge to assess the situation,” Crok said in an email Tuesday.

The paper in question, “Carbon dioxide and a warming climate are not problems,” was published in the journal in May 2024. Crok co-authored it with Andy May, a retired petrophysicist and developmental geologist who worked for Exxon and other oil and energy companies.

Rowland, a lecturer at the Henry George School of Science and environmental engineer, was the editor at the journal who approved it.

According to May’s blog, the journal fired Rowland in August, and the reason it gave was “his publication of our paper.”

An archived version of the journal editorial board webpage shows Rowland was the special editions editor at least since 2023. The current page no longer lists him as an editor.

The Fix reached out to the editorial team at the American Journal of Economics and Sociology several times by email over the past two weeks to ask about the reason for Rowland’s departure. None responded.

Since being published, the paper has been cited 25 times according to google scholar, and scientists David Wojick, Kenneth Richard, and H. Sterling Burnett gave positive reviews, according to May’s blog.

“In short there was no legitimate reason to fire Dr. Rowland for publishing our fully peer-reviewed, and well received, paper,” May wrote.

May told The Fix via email this week that the paper was peer-reviewed prior to publication.

“The two scientists that liked the paper, both are very famous scientists with decades of climate science publications and well over 16,000 citations between them, had many suggestions and I made all their suggested changes to the paper and the changes improved the paper a lot,” May said.

“Post-publication, the response was mostly favorable, but there was a lot of published criticism,” he told The Fix. “But, these critical responses to our paper are swamped by the favorable critiques. The paper is very popular and in the top 0.1% of all papers followed by Wiley… It is also the #2 paper published in AJES.”

Crok told The Fix that others responded to its publication with calls for retraction.

However, May said none of the critics “identified any errors” in their article, which is why it hasn’t been retracted.

The publisher, Wiley, “disagreed with our conclusions and wanted to censor our paper, thankfully the board did not do that, but they did fire Marty, which was a very bad move” May told The Fix.

May told The Fix, “The pressures are huge. Basically, if a climate researcher does not toe the ‘consensus’ line he will receive no funding for his work and will be ostracized. He or she is then often forced to resign or fired.”

Crok agreed, saying scientists whose research does not fit the predominant climate change narrative often are unfairly maligned.

These include Dutch scientist Hessel Voortman, “who published a paper in 2023 about sea level rise along the Dutch coast (showing no acceleration), which led to a group of Dutch scientists asking for retraction,” Crok said.

Clintel, Crok’s foundation based in the Netherlands, focuses on climate education and policies from the standpoint that climate science should be less political. In 2023, Clintel organized a petition of more than 1,600 scientists world-wide, including Nobel Laureates, that argues there is no climate change crisis.

Meanwhile, environmental policy expert H. Sterling Burnett expressed similar concerns about Rowland’s firing when contacted by The College Fix.

“Unfortunately, I’m not surprised at all by the American Journal of Economics and Sociology (AJES) firing of Dr. Rowland,” Burnett said. He is the director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute.

“If anything, I’m surprised at how brave he was in publishing the study,” he said.

Burnett said the field of climate research is heavily censored and not open to dispute. “No one should suffer for their belief in open inquiry that is at the heart of the scientific endeavor, but in the field of climate science, far too many academics do.”

According to Burnett, academics are commonly ostracized or fired “for daring to raise perfectly legitimate questions about the causes and consequences of climate change, and about the policies proposed by the ‘settled science’ community as a response to climate change.”

Burnett said climate research was relatively open to dissenting views up until about 20 years ago when “influential climate alarmists moved to shut down continued debate and discussion about the causes and consequences of climate change, by having open minded journal editors removed from their positions or reined in by journal publishers.”

“[C]limate skeptics were increasingly shut out of the peer review process, and papers openly skeptical of the anthropogenic climate disaster narrative found it nearly impossible to get published in top journals,” he said.

Burnett told The Fix that politicians and media also contributed to disenfranchising so-called “climate deniers” under the guise of protecting scientific consensus.

When asked about claims of consensus to justify scientific censorship, he responded, “Consensus is a political term, not a scientific one and should have no legitimate place in scientific discovery. ” He said that science “is a method, a way of explaining phenomena and discovering facts, not a conclusion set in stone for all time.”

Burnett expressed hope that things are starting to change for the better following the publication of a recent report by the U.S. Department of Energy that pushes back on “climate alarmists.”

The report “is forcing alarmists to address, rather than dismiss out of hand because the ‘science is settled,’ realists long-standing questions, concerns, and critiques of the argument that humans are causing dangerous climate change,” he said.

Crok also mentioned the DOE report in his interview with The Fix, noting that the authors are now facing “severe,” negative pressure for their work.

“This battle will go on, they will try to get the report retracted as well,” Crok said. “This is a worrisome trend in which the mainstream instead of engaging with skeptical scientists simply try to get skeptical papers removed immediately.”

September 18, 2025 - Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science