Scientists call out Joe Rogan for falsely claiming the Earth is cooling: “It’s dumb the way he’s interpreting the graph”
Joe Rogan has been called out — again — over pedalling climate change nonsense.
One may imagine, albeit naively, that the host of the world’s biggest podcast might do some real research before blurting out barefaced lies on his show.
Alas, dear reader, welcome to 2025, where anything goes and it’s simply the reader/listener’s decision to a) believe it or b) observe a period of critical thinking before taking on the nonsense.
Unfortunately, the ubiquity of social media — which has disrupted the delicate balance of chemicals in our brains and overridden millions of years of careful, selective evolutionary processes that allowed us to turn wood into fire and sparks into innovation — means we are no longer able to practice option b. Instead, people just click ‘share,’ further propagating lies pushed by someone who became so popular — and therefore well-regarded — because of his outlandish views and seemingly ‘against the grain’ questioning.
Joe Rogan has used a few recent episodes of his Joe Rogan Experience podcast to refer to a graph published by the Washington Post, in which he erroneously claims that it shows the Earth to be cooling. However, Rogan’s background comes in the form of being hit on the head, and not science, which would have allowed him to approach the numbers in the correct manner.
Joe Rogan & Mel Gibson yesterday were dismissing climate change as a hoax while Gibson's house was burning down in a wildfire exacerbated by climate change. Climate change is real, please stop getting (dis)information from contrarian podcasters who'd fail a junior science exam pic.twitter.com/xfh1V1QZUG
— Dr David Robert Grimes (@drg1985) January 10, 2025
Joe Rogan “spewing old-school denier nonsense”
“There’s a lot of horseshit that’s involved in climate change, I’ve studied that,” Rogan told Mel Gibson on The Joe Rogan Experience earlier this year. “The temperature on Earth is plummeting. Look at the drop at the end, that’s where we are. That’s the reality.”
Before we indulge in what the lab-coated geniuses have to say, allow me to indulge: the fact that Rogan, a UFC commentator and — I repeat — podcast host, says that he has “studied” climate change, is so laughable it’s borderline insulting. Generations of scientists across the world have devoted their lives to the complex problem of climate change, and for Rogan to claim any sort of position on the ladder is a kick in the face to the people who genuinely take the health of our planet seriously.
Speaking to The Guardian, the paper’s co-author Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona, said: “It’s dumb the way he’s interpreting this graph and if he wants to talk about it he should invite me onto the show instead of talking about it to Mel Gibson or Bernie Sanders.”
"Joe is speaking to his audience and they want it to be entertaining, I get it, but it concerns me because he isn’t giving the right message. But it is a bummer that these podcasts with large audiences are spewing this old-school denier nonsense. It’s not helpful. In the US, people are in silos now and climate scientists can’t easily reach people who aren’t sure how climate change works. It’s not a healthy situation.”
“The temperature reconstruction is over millions of years. It’s not on a human timescale,” explained Tierney. “It’s all about the speed and we’ve never seen carbon dioxide and temperature rise as fast as now – even in big extinction events it was slower than this. We evolved in a cooler climate and now we are rapidly warming it up and putting life on this planet in danger. It’s scary.”
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The Guardian also quoted scientist Rollie Willams in his show Climate Town, a YouTube show that analysed Rogan’s mention of the graph. “It’s almost impressive how incorrect he’s able to be about an article he’s looking directly at. 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.”
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