Five ways Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change  » Yale Climate Connections

Joe Rogan has one of the most popular podcasts on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and a combined 50 million followers on YouTube, Spotify, and Instagram. And like nearly all of today’s most popular online shows, Rogan’s spreads climate misinformation.

In an October episode of his podcast, Rogan interviewed two octogenarian fringe climate contrarians, Richard Lindzen and William Happer, who together have been spreading climate misinformation since at least 2012. For over two hours, the trio discussed climate myths and conspiracy theories, many of them identical to the misinformation Lindzen and Happer were peddling well over a decade ago. (See here for a brief debunking of 19 of the myths raised on the show.)

Five common techniques of climate denial  

As Yale Climate Connections reported earlier this year, about one in five U.S. adults and 37% of adults under 30 say they regularly get news from social media influencers — which means they’re likely consuming a lot of myths about climate change. 

I asked John Cook, a cognitive scientist at the University of Melbourne studying climate misinformation, how people can distinguish truth from fiction. I worked alongside Cook in the 2010s to debunk climate myths at the volunteer-run website Skeptical Science.  

Cook recommends learning about the common techniques that bad actors use to distort the facts. 

“Once people spot it in one topic, they can spot it in another,” he explained. 

In a new book chapter, Cook and coauthor Dominik Stecula outline the five common techniques of science denial. 

• Fake experts: presenting an unqualified person or institution as a source of credible information
• Logical fallacies: arguments where the conclusion doesn’t logically follow from the premise
• Impossible expectations: demanding unrealistic standards of certainty before acting on the science
• Cherry-picking: carefully selecting data that appear to confirm one position while ignoring other data that contradicts that position
• Conspiracy theories: an explanation for a situation that rejects the consensus view in favor of a secret plot by powerful groups with a malevolent goal

Cook calls it FLICC for short. And he says when audiences are on the lookout for FLICC tactics, they are better prepared to notice and challenge misinformation. 

Rogan’s podcast often puts FLICC on full display when discussing climate change, so it’s a good example of how the playbook works. 

Rogan’s fake experts 

Rogan’s podcast tends to invite fringe, unqualified climate contrarians who dispute the expert consensus. Happer is a retired physicist with a scant publication record in the field of climate science. Lindzen has an extensive list of climate publications, but his contrarian claims have been consistently proven wrong. In other words, they have not withstood scientific scrutiny or the test of time.

For example, on the podcast, Lindzen referenced a 2001 paper in which he published his “adaptive iris” hypothesis. It suggested that as the atmosphere warms, the area covered by high-elevation clouds will contract like the iris of an eye to allow more heat to escape into space, thus dampening global warming. 

Numerous subsequent papers identified flaws in Lindzen’s iris hypothesis. The body of scientific research now indicates that clouds will most likely slightly amplify global warming. Yet Lindzen continues to peddle this debunked myth decades later.

Logical fallacies 

In a June episode with guest Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rogan regurgitated a tired logical fallacy: the misleading insinuation that because Earth’s climate has changed naturally in the past, present-day climate change must also be natural. 

“The reality is that the Earth’s temperature has never been static,” Rogan said. “It’s always been up and down.” 

This is like claiming that because lightning causes some wildfires, arson doesn’t exist. 

Impossible expectations

In his discussions with Lindzen and Happer, Rogan claimed that climate models have been wrong and thus global warming predictions can’t be believed. It’s easy to set the impossible expectation that models must be perfect to be trusted, but in reality, climate models have been remarkably accurate, having predicted global warming to a high degree of accuracy for decades. 

Read: Computer models have been accurately predicting climate change for 50 years

In contrast, climate contrarians have predicted negligible global warming or even cooling, and have consistently been proven wrong. That includes Richard Lindzen, who in 1989 said he believed Earth had hardly warmed over the prior century and that it would barely warm any more over the next century. An approximate interpretation of Lindzen’s 1989 comments would look something like this:

Cherry-picking 

In the June episode with Sen. Sanders, Rogan referenced a Washington Post article about a paper led by Smithsonian and University of Arizona researcher Emily Judd. 

But Rogan shared only cherry-picked details from the article, not the full context. In doing so, he completely misrepresented Judd’s study, which reconstructed global temperatures over the past 485 million years. 

Rogan misleadingly claimed that the study “found that we’re in a cooling period.” He added, “This was, like, a very inconvenient discovery.” 

In reality, as the Washington Post article clearly outlined, Judd’s study found that global temperatures declined for about 50 million years until around 300,000 years ago, at which point they became relatively stable and modern humans began to evolve. And today’s rate of warming is unparalleled. 

“At no point in the nearly half-billion years that Judd and her colleagues analyzed did the Earth change as fast as it is changing now,” the article said. 

Judd told the Washington Post: “In the same way as a massive asteroid hitting the Earth, what we’re doing now is unprecedented.” 

Conspiracy theories 

Of all the techniques in the climate denier’s playbook, Rogan relies most heavily on conspiracy theorizing. 

In his conversation with Lindzen and Happer, Rogan claimed that when he asks the climate-concerned what research they’ve done, they invariably say they haven’t done any, but that the expert climate consensus can’t be questioned. The implication is that Rogan views people who are concerned about climate change as unthinking sheep. 

While it’s laudable to research a topic to get better informed, people have limited time and capacity. So it’s actually reasonable to defer to an expert consensus on a complex subject like climate change — especially when more than 99% of the experts agree that modern climate change is real and human-caused. In fact, accepting an expert consensus protects us against some of these FLICC characteristics like only listening to fake experts and cherry-picking little bits of data that affirm our biases. 

In 1999, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger identified a psychological effect sometimes called “meta-ignorance” in which people with low understanding in a specific area tend to overestimate their knowledge: They’re ignorant of their relative ignorance. But even when overestimating your own intellectual grasp of a topic, rejecting an overwhelming expert consensus requires strong justification.

That’s where conspiracy theories come in. In 2020, Cook and cognitive psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky co-authored the Conspiracy Theory Handbook. It documented seven traits of conspiratorial thinking: Contradictory, Overriding suspicion, Nefarious intent, Something must be wrong, Persecuted Victim, Immune to evidence, and Re-interpreting randomness, or CONSPIR for short. 

These traits abound in the conversations between Rogan and his guests. In both the episode with Lindzen and Happer and the one with Sanders, Rogan repeatedly mentioned the large amount of money being spent on the clean energy transition, implying nefarious intent among those who accept mainstream climate science. These discussions neglected to mention that numerous fossil fuel companies are among the most profitable in the world or that the industry spent $219 million in the 2024 U.S. election. That’s about 100 times more than clean energy political action committees spent on campaign contributions over the past two years.

Rogan also suggested that the expert climate consensus exists because efforts to research alternative hypotheses won’t receive grant money or be published in scientific journals, and that liberal academic institutions won’t employ those researchers. These claims that climate contrarians are persecuted victims are disproven by Lindzen himself, who was a professor at MIT for 30 years and has published over 200 papers in peer-reviewed journals, mostly on the topic of climate change.

In reality, scientists are motivated to disprove a consensus. They’re excited by discovery and the prospect of becoming the next Newton, Galileo, or Einstein. But sometimes an expert consensus can’t be disproven because it’s knowledge-based and correct, as with human-caused climate change.

So where does that leave us? 

Cook has found that debunking myths with facts alone is rarely sufficient to change people’s minds. But helping people recognize patterns of misinformation can inoculate them against misleading claims. 

“What my psychology research has continued to reinforce and replicate is the effectiveness of technique-based inoculation,” Cook said by email. “Build public resilience against misinformation by explaining the techniques that misinformation uses to distort the facts.”