Never one to properly interpret anything scientific, uber-popular podcaster Joe Rogan has become entranced by a study that affirms his climate skepticism.
Now, as The Guardian reports, one of the study's authors is setting the record straight and pointing out that Rogan is not only drawing the exact opposite conclusion from the study, but that he's spewing misinformation to a vast audience using his incorrect takeaways.
Over two years, scientists from the University of Arizona, Tucson and Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History painstakingly compiled more than 150,000 data points including climate models and fossil records as they created what the Washington Post lauded last year as "the most rigorous reconstruction of Earth’s past temperatures ever produced."
Published nearly a year ago in the journal Science, the paper that has so fixated the 58-year-old shock jock found, upon the painstaking global surface temperature tracking for the past 485 million years on this planet, that Earth has at times been much warmer than previously believed.
The researchers behind this massive undertaking found that those previous spikes in temperatures — like when an asteroid crashed-landed on Earth and killed all the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago, or the 250-million-year-old extinction event known as the "Great Dying" that eradicated most life on this planet — provide more evidence than ever that rapidly rising global heat is accompanied by planet-wide mass death.
To Rogan's drug-addled mind, however, the millennia-spanning temperature spikes and plummets show that climate change is a hoax — and he has a graph, which was produced by the Washington Post in an article about the study, that he thinks proves it.
That graph shows the ups and downs of surface temperatures over millions of years. Somehow, Rogan completely misread the chart's time scale and insists that the "drop at the end" shows that Earth's temperature is "plummeting," as he told scandal-plagued "Braveheart" star Mel Gibson in January when the actor appeared as a guest on his show in January.
"There’s a lot of horsesh*t that’s involved in climate change," Rogan told Gibson. "I’ve studied that."
Rogan also insisted on citing the same chart during an interview with Bernie Sanders this past June, as well as last fall when interviewing archeology denialist Jimmy Corsetti and now-vice president JD Vance when he appeared on the podcast just ahead of the presidential election last year.
(As the Guardian noted, Gibson's Los Angeles mansion burned to the ground during the city's devastating Palisades fires while he was in the midst of recording with Rogan in Austin — a disaster that scientists say was worsened by climate change, making it one of the most destructive blazes in the history of the city of angels.)
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