Never one to properly interpret anything scientific, uber-popular podcaster Joe Rogan has become entranced by a study that affirms his climate skepticism.
Now, as The Guardian reports, one of the study’s authors is setting the record straight and pointing out that Rogan is not only drawing the exact opposite conclusion from the study, but that he’s spewing misinformation to a vast audience using his incorrect takeaways.
Over two years, scientists from the University of Arizona, Tucson and Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History painstakingly compiled more than 150,000 data points including climate models and fossil records as they created what the Washington Post lauded last year as “the most rigorous reconstruction of Earth’s past temperatures ever produced.”
Published nearly a year ago in the journal Science, the paper that has so fixated the 58-year-old shock jock found, upon the painstaking global surface temperature tracking for the past 485 million years on this planet, that Earth has at times been much warmer than previously believed.
The researchers behind this massive undertaking found that those previous spikes in temperatures — like when an asteroid crashed-landed on Earth and killed all the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago, or the 250-million-year-old extinction event known as the “Great Dying” that eradicated most life on this planet — provide more evidence than ever that rapidly rising global heat is accompanied by planet-wide mass death.
To Rogan’s drug-addled mind, however, the millennia-spanning temperature spikes and plummets show that climate change is a hoax — and he has a graph, which was produced by the Washington Post in an article about the study, that he thinks proves it.
That graph shows the ups and downs of surface temperatures over millions of years. Somehow, Rogan completely misread the chart’s time scale and insists that the “drop at the end” shows that Earth’s temperature is “plummeting,” as he told scandal-plagued “Braveheart” star Mel Gibson in January when the actor appeared as a guest on his show in January.
“There’s a lot of horsesh*t that’s involved in climate change,” Rogan told Gibson. “I’ve studied that.”
Rogan also insisted on citing the same chart during an interview with Bernie Sanders this past June, as well as last fall when interviewing archeology denialist Jimmy Corsetti and now-vice president JD Vance when he appeared on the podcast just ahead of the presidential election last year.
(As the Guardian noted, Gibson’s Los Angeles mansion burned to the ground during the city’s devastating Palisades fires while he was in the midst of recording with Rogan in Austin — a disaster that scientists say was worsened by climate change, making it one of the most destructive blazes in the history of the city of angels.)
Jessica Tierney, a University of Arizona paleoclimatologist who co-authored the study Rogan keeps referencing, told the Guardian that every time the podcaster mentions the research, she’s felt bemused.
“I’ve watched his clips and gone: ‘Oh jeez.’ I can only laugh sometimes,” Tierney said. “But it is a bummer that these podcasts with large audiences are spewing this old-school denier nonsense. It’s not helpful.”
As Tierney suggests, Rogan’s wanton misunderstanding of the study seems to stem from his inability — or refusal to — correctly read the data he’s citing correctly.
“The temperature reconstruction is over millions of years. It’s not on a human timescale,” she told the Guardian. “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,” she added, “and now we are rapidly warming it up and putting life on this planet in danger. It’s scary.”
Indeed, when Sanders came onto “The Joe Rogan Experience” in June, the podcaster used that misreading to push back against the Vermont senator’s insistence that climate change “ain’t a hoax” and that the last decade has been “the warmest on record.”
“Did you see the Washington Post piece that they wrote where they did this long-term view?” Rogan asked the two-time presidential hopeful, misattributing the Science journal research to the newspaper. “Essentially they found that we’re in a cooling period… this was like a very inconvenient discovery, but they had to report the data. And kudos to them for doing that.”
That level of willfully ignorant spin was, as climate YouTuber Rollie Williams suggested to the Guardian, “almost impressive” to witness.
“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,” Williams added.
To set the record straight, Tierney is now challenging Rogan to invite her onto the show instead of an actor or a senator.
“It’s dumb the way he’s interpreting this graph,” she told the Guardian, “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.”
“I think it’s safe to say Mel Gibson doesn’t know a whole lot about paleoclimate,” the scientist added.
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