For months now, the popular comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan has been telling his vast audience of a study that shows Earth is cooling – even though this research states the complete opposite.
Rogan’s false claim about the climate crisis, which he has repeatedly aired on the Joe Rogan Experience, one of the world’s most popular podcasts, has exasperated the scientists who authored the research.
It has also highlighted the tide of climate misinformation that regularly emanates from some of the biggest podcasts in the US – outlets where many Americans, particularly younger people, now get their news.
“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,” said Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona and co-author of the research frequently mentioned by Rogan.
“I’ve watched his clips and gone: ‘Oh jeez.’ I can only laugh sometimes. 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.”
Last year, Tierney was part of a group that published an ambitious paper in the Science journal that reconstructed a timeline of Earth’s temperature over the past 485m years. The research, which took two years to compile, was drawn from 150,000 data points, including fossil records and climate models.
The study shows monumental shifts in the world’s climate over the eons, including periods that are far hotter than now, such as when an asteroid crashed to Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs around 66m years ago, and another era, about 250m years ago, when a mass extinction event killed off more than 90% of all species on the planet.
The current period of rapid global heating, caused by the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation in just the last century, is shown on this vast timeline as a comparatively small upward tick at the end of the graph, following a span of relative planetary cooling that followed the demise of dinosaurs.
Rogan has seized upon this temperature graph, as shown in a Washington Post article, to claim big swings in previous temperatures demonstrate concerns over current climate change are overblown.
“There’s a lot of horseshit that’s involved in climate change, I’ve studied that,” Rogan told actor Mel Gibson on the Joe Rogan Experience in January. “The temperature on Earth is plummeting. Look at the drop at the end, that’s where we are. That’s the reality.”
To agreement from Gibson – whose house burned down by fires in Los Angeles on the day the podcast was recorded, a disaster scientists say was worsened by global heating – Rogan added that the world’s temperature has always fluctuated. “This idea that the whole thing is based on carbon emissions from humans is total bullshit, it’s not true,” he said.
Since this conversation, Rogan has raised the topic of the temperature graph on five further episodes, including to his guest Bernie Sanders in June. “Essentially they found that we’re in a cooling period,” Rogan said to the US senator of the researchers’ work. “This was, like, a very inconvenient discovery. But they had to report the data and kudos to them for doing that.”
Rogan’s repeated references to the Washington Post piece elides most of the actual article, which mentions the swift rate Earth is currently heating up and how this is being driven by human-caused emissions. Scientists are unequivocal that the climate crisis is being caused entirely by the emission of greenhouse gases, at a rate not seen during human history.
“It’s almost impressive how incorrect he’s able to be about an article he’s looking directly at,” said Rollie Willams, a climate science and policy expert who presents Climate Town, a YouTube show that tracked Rogan’s mention of the graph.
“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.”
The world has heated up by about 1.2C (2.1F) since the industrial revolution but a crucial aspect of this change is its pace, Tierney pointed out. While the mass extinction event in the Permian period 250m years ago, ominously called “the great dying”, saw Earth’s temperature jump by aboutd 10C, this unfolded over a span of around 50,000 years.
The current surge in temperature has occurred in little more than a century, after humans enjoyed thousands of years of predictable climatic patterns to grow crops and settle near previously stable coastlines. The graph’s latest small upward line, in the context of hundreds of millions of years, represents a remarkable leap in global heat.
“The temperature reconstruction is over millions of years. It’s not on a human timescale,” said Tierney of her work. “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.”
Rogan is not the only high-profile podcaster or online streamer to distort climate science, with eight of the 10 most popular online shows in the US involved in spreading false or misleading climate information, according to Yale Climate Connections. These top-rated shows are dominated by rightwing figures such as Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro and often skew towards a young, male demographic.
The audiences can be vast, too. Rogan, who has a deal with Spotify and is the most popular of all, has more than 20m subscribers on his YouTube channel.
This is about 10 times more people than the primetime viewership of Fox News, a channel that has often faced criticism over its climate coverage, providing Rogan huge clout in dictating the only information many people hear about the climate crisis.
“Ordinary folks don’t learn about climate change by reading science journals,” said Edward Maibach, an expert in climate communication at George Mason University. “They learn about it primarily by listening to what other people have to say about it, which includes social media influencers and podcasters. When those influencers don’t know what they’re talking about, everyone suffers.”
More than a third of US adults aged under 30, and one in five adults overall, say they regularly get their news from social media influencers, polling last year found. Figures such as Rogan are particularly influential because of the parasocial relationship his audience forms, where many feel they know and trust him, Maibach said.
“One would hope that people like Joe Rogan are self-aware enough to know what they know and what they don’t know, and to realize that helping to propagate misinformation and disinformation about our climate is extremely dangerous,” he said.
The producer of the Joe Rogan Experience did not respond to a request for comment about Rogan’s mistaken fixation with the temperature graph. Tierney, the study’s co-author, said she would be willing to appear on the show to provide a more accurate explanation to its audience.
“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,” said Tierney.
“I think it’s safe to say Mel Gibson doesn’t know a whole lot about paleoclimate.”
