Podcaster and former UFC commentator Joe Rogan isn’t exactly known for his scientific expertise, but Rogan’s recent claim that the Earth is cooling—ignoring decades of empirical evidence for global warming—is so egregious that climate experts are straight up roasting him for it.
In several recent episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan has used a temperature graph in a Washington Post article in order to claim that global temperatures are actually plummeting. The graph in question comes from a 2024 study published in the journal Science, in which researchers show a record of Earth’s global mean surface temperature over the last 485 million years. The problem, according to one of the study’s own authors—as well as a host of other experts—is that Rogan has completely misinterpreted the chart.
“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,” study co-author Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona, told The Guardian.
Rogan’s risky misinterpretation
The graph demonstrates how Earth’s climate has experienced tremendous shifts since the dawn of the Paleozoic era some 540 million years ago, including periods that were indeed much hotter than the planet is today. Indeed, Rogan appears to have fixated on the sharp temperature decline toward the end of the graph’s timeline, citing it in six podcast episodes as evidence that climate change is a hoax.
“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.”
What Rogan failed to grasp, however, is the admittedly small—but staggeringly steep—uptick at the very end of the graph. That remarkable uptick marks the current period of rapid warming driven by human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels.
Earth is warming faster than ever before
Since 1850, Earth’s average surface temperature has risen by an average of 0.11 degrees Fahrenheit (0.06 degrees Celsius) every decade, according to NOAA. That rate is unprecedented. Today, Earth’s climate is warming so fast, it is increasing in temperature roughly 30 times faster than immediately before the largest mass extinction event in our planet’s history, a cataclysm known as “the great dying” that occurred some 250 million years ago and was caused by extreme global warming.
“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,” Tierney said. “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.”
By failing to grasp this critical context or communicate it to his legion of followers, Rogan is spreading a false narrative, experts said.
“It’s almost impressive how incorrect he’s able to be about an article he’s looking directly at,” climate science and policy expert Rollie Willams said of Rogan during a recent episode of his YouTube show Climate Town.
“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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