Joe Rogan claims study shows Earth cooling – but report’s authors say he’s wrong

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/04/joe-rogan-climate-cooling-misinformation

by Hrmbee

19 comments

  1. Some of the issues of concern:

    >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.
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    >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.
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    >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.
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    >…
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    >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.
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    >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.
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    >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.
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    >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.
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    >“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.”
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    >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.
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    >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.”
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    >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.
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    >…
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    >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.
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    >“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.
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    >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.

    The most dangerous scenario is when you don’t know what you don’t know, and hopefully people are self-aware to know when they are in that state and refrain from making statements to others about these topics. Unfortunately for people like Rogan, their wealth and influence seemingly depends on their abilities to pontificate about a range of topics (such as the climate) that they have no knowledge of, and are consequently frequently spreading false information to millions of people.

  2. Great. Because we all know that the people who listen to Joe Rogan are the type to look into things more in depth on their own. They don’t just hear what they want to hear then walk away.

  5. Breaking: Absolute caveman releases misinformation for attention and it’s unfortunately working.

  7. What he knows about climatology could be written on the back of a postage stamp. Who cares what a paid stooge of the right wing says.

  8. Climate Town released a video debunking the BS https://youtu.be/r1bMJekCiBw?si=q-z1tzMegIa78Wb_

  9. Does anyone still think this clown is “just asking questions” or “trying to get to the truth”? He’s a grifter like the rest.

  10. No words can adequately describe this level of pig-ignorant stupidity. How can anyone look at what’s happening around the world and proclaim, “The temperature on Earth is plummeting”?

    Just on a personal, anecdotal basis, it’s frigging obvious by now that temperatures are rising and that weather systems are becoming more erratic, more energetic. I can’t remember the last time it properly, heavily snowed here in southern England. Record rainfall, flooding, droughts, and our first ever 40°C summer. And there’s a constant, near-daily onslaught of weather extremes and disasters being reported all over the world, trending upwards year after year.

    Why does this have to be such a partisan issue? Clean tech is one of the ***absolute best*** sectors for economic growth and jobs right now, with double-digit percentage CAGR. Just look at China, now the undisputed leader of renewables with about 80% of the world’s solar manufacturing, exporting an absolute f*ck ton of panels to Africa and elsewhere. Even if you don’t accept the utterly overwhelming evidence of climate change, there are huge opportunities to take advantage of this energy transition. And I’m sure we can all agree that clean air is better for everyone and reduces the burden of healthcare costs.

    These right-wingers seem utterly determined to extract and burn every last gram of fossil fuels, no matter the obvious problems that causes. It’s completely insane, psychotic. And economically illiterate.

  11. no it has to be cooling otherwise Joe Rogan would be wrong.

    His tiny little narcissistic ego could never deal with such a blow.

  13. Remember when you were young and Canada was on fire every summer?

    Yeah… Thought so.. Joe needs to STFU. Who the hell gets their science from this knuckle dragging moron? 

  14. Why are so many unqualified people talking about stuff they can hardly grasp in an authoritative way

  16. He should stick to talking about things he might know something about.

  17. Breaking News – Joe Rogan opinion matters as much as a random guy yelling on the bus. Stop giving him any credibility.

  18. The actor that played the dumb guy from News Radio wasn’t acting.

  19. Cuz Joe Rogan can critically interpret empirically data and climate research studies effectively

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