Debunking Joe Rogan, Dick Lindzen, and Will Happer
Posted on 5 November 2025 by dana1981
Joe Rogan has one of the most popular podcasts on the Spotify and Apple Podcasts platforms, and a combined 50 million followers on YouTube, Spotify, and Instagram. And like nearly all of the most popular online shows, Rogan’s frequently tends to spread climate misinformation.
On his October 21st episode, Rogan interviewed two octogenarian fringe climate contrarians, Richard Lindzen and William Happer, who together have been spreading climate misinformation in the media that we at SkS have been debunking 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.
In this post we’ll do a brief debunking of 19 of the climate myths that were raised in the podcast episode. We’ll look at the underlying psychology in a separate article in the near future. Each of the 19 myths is included in a sub-section below, with the quote provided in a blue box, including a link to the timestamp in the podcast, followed by a brief debunking.
A degree of global warming is a lot
Lindzen @ 6:02: “global mean temperature doesn’t change much, but you know you focus on one degree, a half degree, so it looks like something”
Lindzen @ 22:06: “Gutierrez at the UN says the next half degree and we’re done for. I mean, doesn’t anyone ask, a half degree? I mean, I deal with that between, you know, 9:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m [laughs]. Rogan: it does seem crazy. It’s just that kind of fear of minute change that they try to put into people.”
Seemingly small changes in Earth’s average global temperature represent a tremendous amount of heat energy and can cause large changes in the climate, such as extreme weather events. The last ice age was ‘only’ about 5°C colder than the recent relatively warm period, for example.
Global warming and predictions in the 1970s
Lindzen @ 6:15: “[global mean temperature] was cooling from the 1930s. 1930s were very warm and it was getting cooler until the 70s and that’s why they were saying well you know this is going to lead to an ice age and they focused on that for a while.”
The Earth’s average temperature increased slightly from 1930 to 1970, by about 0.05°C, although this was less clear in the temperature data at the time. Scientists were studying competing effects resulting from the burning of fossil fuels – cooling caused by sulfate aerosols that block sunlight and are caused by sulfur dioxide pollution, and warming from carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. Some studies concluded that if sulfur dioxide emissions were to continue rising rapidly for many more decades, the resulting cooling effect could trigger an ice age. Instead, pollution regulations soon caused those emissions to decline.
A 2008 paper that looked at the relevant research in the 1970s found that a majority of studies were predicting global warming at the time.
Manabe’s accurate early climate models
Lindzen @ 7:06: Suki Manabe showed that even though CO2 doesn’t do much in the way of warming – doubling it will only give you a half degree or so – but if you assumed that relative humidity stayed constant so that every time you warmed a little you added water vapor which is a much more important greenhouse gas, you had doubled the impact of CO2 which now gives you a degree which still isn’t a heck of a lot … that began the demonization of CO2.
Manabe helped develop the first computer climate model, which projected that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would result in about 2°C global warming. Manabe’s modeling work was later included in the famous 1979 ‘Charney Report,’ which noted that two models developed by his team projected a 3°C northern hemisphere warming in response to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and a third projected global warming of around 2°C. The Charney Report also included modeling work by James Hansen and concluded that Earth’s average temperature will warm about 3°C ± 1.5°C in response to doubled atmospheric CO2, which is quite close to the IPCC’s latest ‘very likely’ range of 2–5°C.
Follow the money
Lindzen @ 8:10: “the energy sector is trillions of dollars. anything you can do to overturn it, change it, replace fossil fuels, it’s big bucks, right?
Rogan @ 22:35: “How much money is involved in getting people to buy into this narrative so you can pass some bill that’s called save the world climate some something crazy like that
Numerous fossil fuel companies are among the most profitable in the world, and the industry spent $219 million in the last U.S. election. That’s about 100 times more than clean energy political action committees spent on campaign contributions over the past two years.
Water vapor and clouds amplify warming
Lindzen @ 9:54: if you read the IPCC reports, they’re pointing out, for instance, that water vapor and clouds are much bigger than CO2, and we don’t understand them at all.
The fact that a warmer atmosphere will hold more water vapor (a result of the Clausius–Clapeyron relation) and thus amplify warming caused by other greenhouse gases is well-known. As the latest IPCC report put it, “Greater atmospheric water vapour content, particularly in the upper troposphere, results in enhanced absorption of [longwave] and [shortwave] radiation and reduced outgoing radiation. This is a positive feedback.”
The IPCC report also concluded that clouds will very likely amplify global warming:
“The net effect of changes in clouds in response to global warming is to amplify human-induced warming, that is, the net cloud feedback is positive (high confidence) … An assessment of the low-altitude cloud feedback over the subtropical oceans, which was previously the major source of uncertainty in the net cloud feedback, is improved owing to a combined use of climate model simulations, satellite observations, and explicit simulations of clouds, altogether leading to strong evidence that this type of cloud amplifies global warming. The net cloud feedback, obtained by summing the cloud feedbacks assessed for individual regimes, is 0.42 [–0.10 to +0.94] W m–2°C–1. A net negative cloud feedback is very unlikely (high confidence).”
Nobody is killing cattle for the climate
Rogan @ 11:17: in the UK they were getting rid of cows. They were forcing people to kill cows
Lindzen @ 1:37:35: there were consequences in Ireland. They had to kill half their cattle.
There are about 7 million cattle in Ireland. The Irish Department of Agriculture proposed to cull 200,000 over three years to help meet the country’s climate targets. This would represent about 3% of the nation’s cattle, not 50%, and it never happened, though cattle herds populations in the country were reduced by 276,000 over the past year for economic reasons.
Fossil fuels are expensive
Rogan @ 12:02: How are these net zero policies stopping people from getting electricity? Lindzen: Okay. Well, by making it expensive, by eliminating fossil fuels, fossil fuels are cheaper. Uh, at least the experience in the UK is when you switch to “renewables,” it tripled the price of electricity.
Although it’s complicated to compare the costs of different types of power generation that have different profiles, solar and wind are generally considered the cheapest sources of new electricity today. For example, Bloomberg New Energy Finance concluded in 2021 that “Two-thirds of the global population lives where renewables are the cheapest new power generation option,” and solar power costs in particular have declined significantly since then.
Recent spikes in UK energy prices are due to disruptive factors related to its residual reliance on natural gas, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
CO2 both leads and lags temperature changes
Lindzen @ 17:14: [Al Gore] was showing this cycle of ice ages and CO2 and temperature going together. And uh it never bothered him that the temperature changed first and then the CO2.
A 2012 study found that the picture is much more nuanced than Lindzen claims in this myth. The authors found that at the end of the last ice age, Earth’s orbital cycles triggered a melting of large quantities of ice in the Arctic, causing fresh water to flood into the oceans. This influx of fresh water then disrupted ocean current circulation, in turn causing a seesawing of heat between the hemispheres. The Southern Hemisphere and its oceans warmed first, starting about 18,000 years ago. As the Southern Ocean warms, the solubility of CO2 in water falls. This causes the oceans to give up more CO2, releasing it into the atmosphere. This increase in CO2 then caused the Earth as a whole to warm.
In short, Earth’s orbital cycles caused some regional warming, which was then amplified into global warming by rising CO2.
CO2 was high in the past, and Earth was hot
Rogan @ 17:33: there have been times where the CO2 was much higher in the atmosphere but the temperature was colder.
In general, past global temperatures and CO2 levels are well correlated.
Declining crop yields are more important than global greening
Rogan @ 17:47: the other really inconvenient thing with CO2 is that the Earth is actually greener than it has been in a long time.
Although increased CO2 levels have led to ‘global greening,’ the CO2 fertilization effect diminishes over time. Moreover, worsening extreme weather like heatwaves, droughts, and floods are already suppressing crop yields and will increasingly do so in the future.
The expert climate consensus
Rogan @ 19:32: To me it’s very strange to see an almost unanimous acceptance that we have settled this, that the science has settled from so many people and both the left and in academia and even on the right there’s a lot of people on the right that believe that.
Scientists follow the evidence, and there is an overwhelming expert consensus on human-caused climate change because there is an overwhelming body of supporting evidence. It’s what we call a knowledge-based consensus.
Climate changed naturally in the past, and anthropogenically now
Rogan @21:15: The weirdest thing is when you look at the charts of the overall temperature of Earth that have been, you know, from core samples over a long period of time. It’s this crazy wave and like no one was controlling it back then and we’re supposed to believe that we can control it now?
There is overwhelming evidence that human greenhouse gas emissions are driving the incredibly rapid and dangerous climate change that is currently occurring. There are also natural factors that cause much more slow and gradual climate changes, generally driven by changes in atmospheric CO2.
The Climategate nothingburger
Lindzen @27:00: somebody anonymous released the emails from a place in England, the University of East Anglia, which has a lot of people pushing climate alarm. And they were communicating with other people like Michael Mann and so on. And they were talking about blocking publication and getting rid of editors and doing this and doing that and so on.
Nine independent enquiries have investigated the conduct of the scientists involved in the emails. None found evidence of fraud or conspiracies, and all cleared the scientists of any wrongdoing, but the contents of the emails were taken out of context and grossly misrepresented.
Climate models have been accurate
Rogan @ 40:45: [almost nobody has] any idea what the actual predictions are, how wrong they’ve been, what Al Gore predicted in this stupid movie, which is so far off. He thought we were all going to be dead today, right? There’s very little change between 2006 and today, right?
Mainstream climate predictions have been remarkably accurate, unlike those by climate contrarians, including Richard Lidzen, who said in 1989, “I personally feel that the likelihood over the next century of greenhouse warming reaching magnitudes comparable to natural variability seems small.” That, like most of Lindzen’s claims, turned out to be remarkably wrong.
See this post for a description of this chart
Sea level rise is accelerating
Happer @ 1:09:38: [sea level rise] hasn’t accelerated; there’s no evidence that CO2 has made any difference. It started rising roughly 1800 at the end of the Little Ice Age and it’s not changing very much.
Sea level rise is accelerating. In the 1990s it was rising at 2.1 millimeters per year and today it’s rising at 4.5 millimeters per year – more than twice as fast.
Climate change could cripple the economy
Lindzen @ 1:18:02: As best I can tell, none of these models predict catastrophe. Koonin made the point I think correctly that even with the UN’s models you’re talking about a 3% reduction in national product or gross domestic product by 2100.
Recent climate-economics research has estimated that climate damages could reduce global GDP anywhere from 5% to 30% by 2100.
Climate change is making extreme weather more intense, including hurricanes
Rogan @ 1:31:43: It’s extreme weather events. That’s what I keep hearing. The hurricanes are getting stronger. They’re getting more frequent. And they repeat that. And I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Lindzen: No. No … the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the UN, was honestly saying they could find no evidence that these were related.
Climate change is making hurricanes more destructive, and the latest IPCC report said:
“New evidence strengthens the conclusion from the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR1.5) that even relatively small incremental increases in global warming (+0.5°C) cause statistically significant changes in extremes on the global scale and for large regions (high confidence). In particular, this is the case for temperature extremes (very likely), the intensification of heavy precipitation (high confidence) including that associated with tropical cyclones (medium confidence), and the worsening of droughts in some regions (high confidence).”
Methane is causing a lot of global warming
Lindzen @ 1:39:23: there’s so little methane in the atmosphere that if you got rid of all of it, it would have almost no effect compared to CO2.
Methane is the second-largest contributor to the rising greenhouse effect, responsible for about 30% of global warming since the Industrial Revolution. The European Union Climate and Clean Air Coalition Scientific Advisory Panel estimated that reducing human methane emissions by 50% over the next 30 years would mitigate global temperature change by about 0.2°C.
It’s a lot hotter today than it was in the 1930s
Rogan @ 2:10:14: What are the warmest years on historical record in terms of like recent years? Happer: ‘34, ‘35, 1930.
According to temperature data from NASA Goddard, both global and U.S. temperatures in the 1930s were about 1.4°C colder than they are today.