“X” is an absolute sewer of climate disinformation, putting to lie Elon Musk’s assertion that good information should always drive out bad. Indeed, everything we know about social media shows that the exact opposite is true.
I’m finding more and more of my time is spent responding to climate denial talking points that I debunked thoroughly 14 years ago.
And then, there is the endless creativity of climate deniers, coming up with entirely new ways to remain ignorant.
A few weeks ago, Joe Rogan proved again he does not Grok climate science, and once again used his platform to deliver pure, long-ago-debunked drivel from always-reliable cranks Richard Lindzen and William Happer.
It’s just one indicator that since the re-election of Donald Trump, we are in a new age of climate denial, where the undead, long debunked zombie climate denial shibboleths rise again to walk among us.
Dana Nucitelli in Yale Climate Connections:
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.
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.
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:
In the June episode with Sen. Sanders, Rogan referenced a Washington Post articleabout 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.”
Rogan’s show is a product with a specific market. It’s not that he’s being ‘open minded’ by constantly inviting deniers and not having actual climate scientists on (Andrew Dessler might be the last one, 2022) – he’s catering to his market.
It’s like Tucker having Nick Fuentes on and sending him nothing but softballs. He says he’s just ‘hearing him out’ – but that’s bs – he’s providing a product to his intended market.
Intentional ignorance isn’t really stupidity – it’s lying through omission. People reveal what they believe as much by what they don’t say as by what they say.
Now, if Rogan had every other show with climate scientists, his target market would become upset and his ratings would drop. Tucker would have been attacked by his market if he had gone after Fuentes. Fox News, in the very briefest of moments when they go after Trump, feel pain from that.
It’s all confirmation bias, of course, the natural enemy of the rational discourse flag Rogan and other conservative commenters proudly wave, and which they betray continuously.
Rogan’s ‘trick’ is to admit he’s an idiot. It allows him to sit back and seem reasonable while providing a platform to his guests to say whatever they want. To his audience he seems like he’s being completely rational. But, he’s filtering what guests he has on, and he’s filtering what he’s asking them and when he doesn’t try to refute them – and this is all geared to appeal to his listeners.
It’s irritating to see someone like Rogan pull out ‘geologic timescale’ as if that is how we live. As you suggested in the lead in to this article, it is only made less irritating by innumerable previous infections with the same virus.
For twice as long as the Egyptian pyramids are old, Earth has had the same temperature. Everything about our civilization, from our agriculture to the locations of our cities (around harbors, for trade), is attuned to that temperature. And yet here, once again, comes a puppet of the fossil-fuel industry, helpfully suggesting that we’re not seeing the ‘big picture’, by including in our discussions temperatures from the Age of Tyrannosaurus Rex. Joe Rogan, if you’re listening: if T-Rex were here, you would not be. Try to focus on the Earth that made it possible for human culture to thrive, and how we are acting to screw that up, and how we can act to prevent that. We get it: Earth is old. Planets are like that. But appeals to a planets age to support climate inaction are just misdirections that may prevent an old age for your children and grandchildren.