<scp>AJES</scp> Board Response to an Internal Controversy About Climate‐Change Denial

As part of a planned special section on climate change, an earlier AJES editor solicited an article by Andy May and Marcel Crok that was intended to counterbalance the scientific consensus that climate change is a serious problem caused largely by human activities. However, since the article was written more in a spirit of defiance or rebellion than as a contribution to a dialog, it has posed a number of problems for the journal. While it is conceivable for an article to raise questions from within the scientific community about the validity of methods and procedures of scientists, the article in question did not meet that standard. Instead, it is written by two authors who lack any experience publishing in scientific journals and who start with a normative commitment to economic growth rather than to scientific understanding. They thus impugn the integrity of any scientific work that might support restrictive energy policies that would reduce the rate of GDP growth. An article based on a method that starts with a desired outcome and works backward to select evidence that conforms to a predetermined conclusion lacks the minimal characteristics of a scholarly contribution. That is particularly true on a topic with more scientific input than any question in history. 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. The easiest decision would have been to simply pull the article and to publish the other articles in the issue. However, similar articles are ubiquitous on the Internet, and withholding publication will not restrict the flow of popular criticism of the climate consensus. Since the aim of AJES is to serve the public by discussing questions of social significance, we have chosen to make use of an awkward situation by confronting directly the abuse of research methods in this article. Rather than backtracking and refusing to publish an article that would normally be rejected, we prefer to publish the article in question in combination with (1) this explanation of why AJES has chosen to publish it, (2) a rebuttal by physicist Tinus Pulles, and (3) an examination by Clifford Cobb, a former AJES editor, of the social and political context of the climate debate. We hope that everyone might gain by opening climate-change denialism to scrutiny in this way. The article by May and Crok is a standard denialist article that questions the human role in climate change. A previous generation of deniers asserted that the earth is not growing warmer, but recent denialists have dropped that line of argument. The article relies on the fact 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. May and Crok and other politically motivated critics of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) play upon the confusion of modern citizens who are trying to put the pieces together. They present what appear to be anomalies in the consensus and claim that scientists have ignored those anomalies or even suppressed evidence of them. They do this in scattershot fashion. May and Crok raise issues about various secondary issues to create the impression that these subsidiary questions undermine the conclusion that human activity is primarily responsible for climate change. 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. Climate change denialism has gained a foothold in American culture because there are many small anomalies in the scientific models that collectively form the foundations of the climate consensus. Some anomalies have been accounted for by the continuing work of scientists. Others remain mysteries to resolve in the future. In short, anomalies do not disprove a thesis. They reveal the need for further research. Occasionally, they point to the need to redirect research. Every anomaly noted by critics has been previously examined by multiple scientists. The chances of discovering an anomaly that will not be subjected to rigorous examination are about as great as stubbing one's toe on a solid gold rock in the desert. It may take scientists several years to develop more comprehensive models that resolve existing anomalies. In the meantime, each anomaly might seem to non-scientists to be a failure of science. That is not the case. Science advances by asking questions that have no immediate answer. In any field of science, there are always anomalies and unanswered questions. Those rough edges are an important part of the scientific enterprise. When skeptics play upon public confusion about this process to disparage science, they are knowingly playing politics with science to advance their own agenda. Climate-change denial is now part of the political landscape. What academic journals do with these questions is important, and simple exclusion is no longer enough. The popularity on the Internet of denialist articles, such as the one published here, is a symbol of the inability of scientists, social scientists, and academic publishers to prevent the kind of schism that has arisen between experts and a large segment of the public. This is most apparent in the United States, where science itself has become a partisan issue. AJES believes social scientists have a responsibility to respond to issues of public importance with the tools of analysis they have developed. AJES began during World War II with the aim of making judicious use of the social sciences to prevent a recurrence of the events of the 1930s that led to war. Influenced by the normative writings of Henry George, AJES is not a typical positivist social science journal. AJES shares with most economic journals a normative bias in favor of market competition and economic efficiency. What sets AJES apart is an offsetting normative bias that social and economic equality are possible, but only within a legal and fiscal environment that does not presently exist. In addition, AJES supports the view that market prices should incorporate the social and environmental costs of economic activity. Economic growth that ignores those costs is not an end in itself because growth that ignores costs is not real growth. Furthermore, economics is embedded in a larger social matrix, which adds to the complexity of the purposes served by economic goals. AJES starts with a normative bias that seeks more comprehensive goals than neoclassical economics does. AJES remains steadfastly opposed, as it was when founded in 1941, to any political philosophy that mocks science, democracy, and human equality. Like other economic journals, AJES has a generally supportive view of economic growth, but it shares the spotlight with other values. How is this related to climate denialism? Since AJES regards economic growth as a value only if it benefits an entire society, it is wary of any philosophy that makes GDP growth the pinnacle of value and makes other economic and social values subsidiary to it. By contrast, most articles and books challenging the climate consensus seem to start with the premise that any action that potentially reduces GDP growth violates the highest normative principle. The fear among denialists that climate mitigation policies will violate their supreme principle thereby makes the methods of science also subservient to the norm of GDP growth. To some extent, the pursuit of knowledge has always been distorted by economic interests. But this new economic methodology has pushed the perversion of knowledge to new heights. This ideology makes the natural sciences entirely subordinate to a particular form of normative economics. Since the ultimate focus of denialists is economic growth rather than climate change per se, it would be much more intellectually honest for denialists to write exclusively on the valuation of damage from climate change and the costs of dealing with that damage. This is especially true if they are going to accept the existence of “natural” climate change and deny anthropogenic climate change. 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. Adaptation costs will keep rising whether climate change is entirely caused by natural phenomena or is mostly caused by human activity. 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. The response to the submission of a proposed article by denialists thus requires special attention from journal editors. Such a submission deserves an initial reading. There is a remote possibility that some author may present a new hypothesis, backed by new evidence that overturns what has been deemed to be “settled science.” But when groups spend years seeking to show allegiance to an unquestioning belief in the paramount value of economic growth, their apparent efforts to introduce new scientific hypotheses cannot be considered genuine. They are consistently acting in bad faith. But does that mean such work should be rejected, or should it be published for the sake of critical analysis? At a certain point, ideas of social significance may need to be considered from a sociological perspective and not merely in terms of their intellectual viability. Around 30% of Americans question the scientific consensus that rapid global warming results primarily from human causes. That skepticism has bled into dozens of other issues. Ignoring this social phenomenon and waiting for it to blow over has not worked. We therefore chose to publish the May and Crok article along with two responses that show its flaws and place it in a larger context. We hope readers will find that this strategy can help increase public appreciation of a few of the important questions related to climate change. We were not involved in decisions regarding the remaining articles in this section on climate change. They were selected by the editors in accordance with standard AJES editorial policies.