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Energy and
Environment is a journal publishing articles on energy
technology and policy. It is most widely known for its publication
of articles that challenge mainstream scientific research on
climate change.
The journal is published by Multi-Science
Publishing Company, which states that it publishes journals
that "fill gaps in the scientific literature". The journal
describes itself as "an interdisciplinary journal aimed at natural
scientists, technologists and the international social science and
policy communities covering the direct and indirect environmental
impacts of energy acquisition, transport, production and use". It
has been described by Real Climate, a website run by
scientists working on research on the earth's climate, as "a
journal for climate sceptics", and papers published in Energy
and Environment have been widely cited by climate sceptics as
alternative perspectives on climate change science.
Energy and Environment is edited by
Dr Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, Emeritus Reader for the
Department of Geography at the University of Hull. In
correspondence with the
Chronicle of Higher Education, she stated that by editing
Energy and Environment she is "following [her]
political agenda - a bit, anyway". She identifies herself as a
climate sceptic, and states that in her role as editor she has
"published peer-reviewed papers and opinion pieces by all the best
known 'sceptics'" and knows a number of them "personally". She
suggests that Energy and Environment has therefore
"attracted, inter alia, papers from IPCC-critical and therefore IPCC-excluded
scientists".
Dr Boehmer-Christiansen has argued that "most climate change
[research] since the late 1980s has been government- and
grant-funded with the clearly stated objective that it must
support a decarbonisation agenda for the energy sector".
Energy and Environment is co-edited by Dr Benny Peiser, director of the
Global Warming Policy
Foundation, previously a part-time Senior Lecturer in Sports
Science at Liverpool John Moores University, and a prominent critic
of the climate change research community.
Professor Bjørn Lomborg, is listed as a member of
Energy and Environment's editorial board but appears
to have
resigned in 2010, apparently to avoid being closely associated
with the journal's sceptic editorial views. His resignation from
Energy and Environment came shortly after his
thinktank
commissioned its first research into how best to mitigate climate
change in 2009.
In 2003, an article by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick was
published by Energy and Environment criticizing the
statistical methodology behind Michael Mann and colleagues' research into
global warming. McIntyre and McKitrick's article challenged the
statistical methods that showed global temperature readings to have
sharply
increased in the 20th Century, but was refuted by a
team of climate researchers in a peer-reviewed article in
2005.
Senator James Inhofe, the Chairman of the United
States Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, cited studies
in Energy and Environment to support of his assertion
in a
2009 Senate Minority Report that "[o]ver 700 dissenting
scientists… from around the globe [have] challenged man-made global
warming claims made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC)". Senator Inhofe has also cited the opinions of
authors regularly published in Energy and Environment,
including Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, Richard Lindzen, Stephen
McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, in speeches to the Senate that
criticise climate change research and media coverage of the topic
(2003,
2005,
2006).
It is unclear whether Energy and Environment is peer-reviewed.
The journal is not listed by the ISI Web of Knowledge, which
provides "comprehensive
coverage of the world's most important and influential
journals". ISI listing is a generally accepted standard of
relevance in the natural sciences. SCOPUS, a similarly
prominent academic citation and abstracts database, lists
Energy and Environment as a
trade journal: "a serial publication covering and intended to
reach a specific industry, trade or type of business". SCOPUS
defines trade journals as "seldom refereed" and with "few or no
references". EBSCO,
another citation and abstracts database, describes Energy and
Environment as a peer-reviewed
academic journal.
In February 2011 Bill Hughes, director of Multi-Science
publishing, threatened Real Climate's Gavin Schmidt with a libel
suit unless he retracted a statement about the journal. Schmidt
alleged that Energy and Environment have
"effectively dispensed with substantive peer review for any
papers that follow the editor's political
line". Schmidt described the fallout of
such a situation:
"[Y]ou end up with a backwater of
poorly presented and incoherent contributions that make no impact
on the mainstream scientific literature or conversation. It simply
isn't worth wading through the dross in the hope of finding
something interesting."
Schmidt has refused to retract the statement.
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