Topline
A scientist whose research has been cited by podcaster Joe Rogan as evidence against global warming has spoken up to say Rogan is grossly misunderstanding the study he says supports his claims, making her the latest scientist to slam him over “old-school denier nonsense.”
Joe Rogan on April 13, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
Key Facts
In interviews with Mel Gibson, Bernie Sanders and others on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Rogan has claimed a graph published by journal Science and reprinted by The Washington Post proves “the temperature on Earth is plummeting.”
The chart, a timeline of the Earth’s temperature over 485 million years, shows that the planet has gone through periods of being much warmer than it is now, but also demonstrates that never in a half-billion years has the planet warmed as quickly as is happening now.
Jessica Tierney, one of the co-authors of the study that included the graph, told The Guardian on Thursday the way Rogan is interpreting the graph is “dumb” and said while Earth has indeed been warmer before, modern humans evolved in a cooler climate and “now we are rapidly warming it up and putting life on this planet in danger.”
She explained that it took 50,000 years for the Earth’s temperature to rise 10 degrees Celsius in a mass extension event called “the great dying” 251 million years ago, but that the temperature has risen a tenth that much (1.2 degrees C) in just the 150 years since the Industrial Revolution.
Daniel Lunt, another of the study’s co-authors, told AFP in July that the phases of warming and cooling Rogan is referencing happened “so slowly that they are essentially undetectable on the timescale of a human lifetime,” but the modern pace of warming is much quicker.
David Arkush, director of the climate program at progressive think tank Public Citizen, debunked several of Rogan’s most common talking points in a YouTube video, including the idea that the modern “climate change emergency” is a financial scam from which green energy corporations, government agencies and climate scientists profit.
Arkush says the money invested in climate work globally is equal to what a single major energy company, Exxon Mobile, makes in just two weeks: “So if you want to talk about who’s got the most money in the game, and the most financial interest to protect, it’s obviously big oil.”
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Crucial Quote:
“It’s almost impressive how incorrect he’s able to be about an article he’s looking directly at,” Rollie Willams, a climate science and policy expert, told The Guardian. “It’s also an incredible example of how climate misinformation sneaks into extremely popular media and then gets absorbed into the brains of millions of Americans.”
Tangent
Other people have slammed Rogan for spreading the misinformation to his millions of listeners, but he’s not the only one doing it. Yale Climate Connections found that almost 40% of adults under 30 say they get their news from social media influencers like Rogan, and the same study found eight of the nation’s 10 most popular online shows have spread false or misleading information about climate change. Left-leaning Media Matters found the majority of most popular online shows are right-leaning, and hosts like Rogan, Ben Shapiro and Russell Brand spread climate change falsehoods. “The Joe Rogan Experience” is Spotify’s most popular podcast and has 14.5 million followers on the platform, plus another 20.2 million on YouTube and 19.9 million on Instagram.
Key Background
The Earth has been warming at an unprecedented rate since the mid-1800s, when the Industrial Revolution introduced a skyrocketing usage of fossil fuels and other behaviors that kicked off a warming rate not seen in the past 10,000 years, according to NASA. The average temperature of the Earth’s surface is about 1.2°C warmer than it was in the late 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, according to the United Nations, and some places are getting hotter more quickly than others. The study often miscited by Rogan found that the global climate has been more dynamic and extreme over long-term history than researchers previously thought, but still never warmed as quickly as it has now. The rapid period of warming that spurred “the great dying” brought acid rain and boiling oceans—warning signs scientists say should be heeded in modern times. “By analogy, we should be worried about human warming because it’s so fast,” Tierney told the Post. “We’re changing Earth’s temperature at a rate that exceeds anything we know about.”