On his podcast, Joe Rogan talks about a lot of things. Sometimes, that can spark plenty of controversy; that controversy may have the paradoxical effect of also getting him more listeners. That aspect of Rogan’s whole persona has also led him into some high-profile feuds, including with Neil Young. The latest people who Rogan has clashed with aren’t nearly as high-profile as Young — but questions of science and disinformation are at the heart of this new disagreement as well.
Last September, Science published a paper titled “A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature.” As The Guardian‘s Oliver Milman reported, Rogan has mentioned the paper on his podcast, stating that the paper shows evidence that the planet is actually getting cooler — thus questioning the narrative of climate change.
The paper’s authors beg to differ, pointing out that Rogan’s analysis of their findings doesn’t take into effect the scale of their paper. (Rogan has mentioned it in conversations with both Bernie Sanders and Mel Gibson.) “The temperature reconstruction is over millions of years. It’s not on a human timescale,” one of the paper’s authors, the University of Arizona’s Jessica Tierney, told The Guardian.
Tierney added, “We evolved in a cooler climate and now we are rapidly warming it up and putting life on this planet in danger.”
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Combatting fake history in the era of “fake news”“[I]t is a bummer that these podcasts with large audiences are spewing this old-school denier nonsense. It’s not helpful,” Tierney told The Guardian. “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.”
In her comments to The Guardian, Tierney also offered to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience to discuss the Science paper. We’ll see if it happens — and if it does, how much that will accomplish in terms of dispelling disinformation. Seems worth a try, regardless.
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