It’s safe to say that deniers rarely get their work published in peer-reviewed literature. So longtime sea level rise denier Nils-Axel Mörner and his co-author Pamela Matlack-Klein must be celebrating having published six papers in actual scientific journals, written thanks to a funded trip to Fiji.
Graham Readfearn reported last week in DeSmog that the pair got funding from the fossil-fuel-friendly CO2 Coalition to go to Fiji and produce studies disputing the consensus that sea level rise is happening due to human activity. The studies were, somewhat miraculously, published in the peer-reviewed literature instead of the usual dark-corner-of-the-internet blog posts we see from these types.
Unfortunately for Mörner and Matlack-Klein, the journals publishing their studies aren’t much different than blogs--Australian National University’s Kurt Lambeck told Readfearn they’re “of little academic standing.”
Readfearn found that one of the journals used by Mörner, International Journal of Engineering Science and Invention, has no contact address, and its parent publisher lists only a Gmail address as a contact. Another journal’s publisher, MedCrave Group, lists its mailing address as a parcel service in Edmond, Oklahoma, and was caught publishing a fake case report based on a Seinfeld episode--not exactly a publishing group with a thorough peer-review process.
Another publisher, Juniper Publishing Group, was caught in a different hoax when a professor successfully installed his dog to the journal’s editorial board, using a picture of Kylie Minogue in the application, while the International Journal of Earth & Environmental Sciences is published out of the predatory-journal-hotspot of Bangalore, India, and has a website Readfearn describes as “barely legible.”
The journals are all open access, a set-up where the study authors pay for their work to be published. While there plenty of totally legitimate, respected and influential open access journals, the ones publishing this sea level rise denial fall on the other end of the spectrum. These exhibit traits of “predatory” journals, due to their low quality, lack of rigorous editing and proper peer-review, and high-fee structure that more or less allows anyone to publish anything so long as they pay for it. They make money off of academics who are desperate to publish anywhere, and don’t take the time to do due diligence on the journal.
Despite the reputation of these journals, there is of course the possibility that these studies are solid, so Readfearn asked Lambeck to read the studies to see if they held up. They did not. Lambeck called two “trivial,” said one lacked any evidence for its claims and should have been “rejected out of hand,” and that overall “none would have passed the reviewing process for more reputable journals.”
One of the others begins by referencing the now-debunked Daily Mail story about Tom Karl’s pause paper and alleges similar (imagined) malfeasance is taking place with sea level rise data. Given that the Daily Mail had to run a correction on that story, it’s hard to believe there’s much of a peer-review process at that journal.
Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that the CO2 Coalition's fossil fuel funders, Matlack-Klein and Mörner are reveling in the glory of a half-dozen nominally peer-reviewed papers. But they won’t hold much sway in the legitimate scientific community, given the evidence-free, “trivial” and otherwise suspect content, and that they’re published in questionable journals with little to no quality control.
That’s the story of Mörner’s glory.
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories: