Arguments
Five ways Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change
Posted on 10 November 2025 by dana1981
This is a re-post from 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:
An approximate reconstruction of Richard Lindzen’s 1989 MIT Tech Talk comments (blue) vs. observed global average temperatures from NASA Goddard (black). Created by Dana Nuccitelli as detailed here.
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.
Lewandowsky, S., & Cook, J. (2020). The Conspiracy Theory Handbook. Used with permission.
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.”
Very informative and accurate commentary, except I have one nit pick:
Commentary says: "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."
This is wrong about Lindzen and conflates a whole lot of things. Lindzen cannot be classified as a fake expert. Lindzen is certainly a well qualified in climate science. His CV and publishing record shows this. The fact he has been proven wrong on various issues doesn't make him non qualified. Experts are sometimes proven wrong. The fact hes a contrarian doesn't make him a non expert or non qualified. Hes not a fringe scientist. IMHO Lindzen is a very bad choice to use as an example of a fake expert. However several of his reasonings fit the examples of cherry picking and logical fallacies etc,etc.
Happer is arguably a fake expert but not an ideal expample because at least he has a physics degree. Someone like Christopher Moncton would be much better example of a fake expert, because he is interviewed as if he's an expert, but he has no climate science related qualifications at all. He has a BArts degree in classical studies and a journalism diploma.
Nigelj : Yes, but I will nitpick your nitpick.
Having made a number of posts recently on the other Rogan/ Lindzen/ Happer thread, I feel duty bound to comment on Lindzen particularly.
You make good points ~ but ~ a lot of it comes down to plain old semantics. While in some ways it's fair to label Lindzen as an expert rather than a fake expert . . . nevertheless there is the matter of Lindzen's appalling track record. He's not just been wrong on some things (yes, occasionally allowable for experts) but he's been consistently wrong for decades, and has refused to make correction ~ and he has persisted in misleading the public (for decades! ).
Does that in fact disqualify him as "expert"? Oh, fickle Semantics.
Does an academic, despite having advanced Doctorates in Mathematics, really qualify as a true expert if he persistently assures the public that 2+2=5 ??
Also sad, when Rogan obviously prefers "5" .
Eclectic, youre right Lindzen makes a lot of mistakes, but I dont see how that makes him a fake expert. Because the only logical definition of a fake expert is someone without relevant qualifications.The incessant false claims do however make him a very unreliable, poor quality expert. I dont see how we can stretch that to mean fake.
I'm probably being a bit pedantic and I get your point about semantics, but if we say Lindzen is a fake expert its so easy for the denialists to just list his impressive qualifications and the public will see that.
I think the question "relevant qualifications" is critical.
For Lindzen, his educational background is physics (undergrad) and mathematics (grad). Both give an excellent background to lead into what I consider to be the primary focus of his academic career - meteorology. His early work, from what I know, seemed to focus on various aspects of atmospheric dynamics. Weather is strongly dependent on the discipline of geophysical fluid dynamics, due to the need to track short-term variations in atmospheric circulation.
You would think that this is also a good place to take "transferable skills" into climate science, but Lindzen seems to have botched this. In my experience, meteorologists that reject the science of climate change often do so on the basis of a couple of ingrained viewpoints.
I don't know if Lindzen followed either of those paths, but he certainly has brought failed thinking into his climate-related work.
Happer is a somewhat different case. Again, he's a physicist. He worked on atomic physics, optics, and spectroscopy, and did work in atmospheric radiation transfer. Again, you'd expect this to be an excellent set of transferable skills to deal with climate, but no such luck. His Wikipedia page indicates that he was dismissed from his position with the US department of energy in 1993, due to his views on the ozone layer. This suggests a strong predilection to reject environmental issues - one that existed long before taking on the climate change fight.
So I would see both of these fellows as people that had good backgrounds and transferable skills that should have enabled them to move into climate science. But neither of them did it well. Lindzen has at least published in the climate literature, even if much of his work has not survived detailed examination. Happer just seems out of his depth.
Unreliable, poor quality "experts" for sure. How poor and unreliable you need to be to meet the "fake experts" category is probably subjective. Easy to call "fake" when someone has no evidence of transferable skills that would help them understand climate science. ("I'm a Nobel laureate!" is a pretty weak argument when your Nobel is for literature.) A lot harder to call "fake" when someone has a background that would suggest they have suitable transferable skills - but simply did a crap job transferring them.
You are right, gentlemen.
FLICC is a great concept, particularly when discussing clear-cut matters. Monckton is an excellent example of a clear-cut Fake Expert. The cases of Lindzen & Happer . . . get us deeper into murky semantics. Both are highly intelligent, but doing a crap job of thinking.
All this, motives aside ~ for we can speculate about their obvious & less obvious psychological "high crimes and misdemeanors" but most people are (properly) not much interested in that topic. After all, it is the outcome that matters, in practical politics.
In my mind, Lindzen started as an expert, and then progressively degraded his claim to that title, by his persistent and pig-headed errors (which he doubles-down on). And as you say, there is no point in publicly saying that he has no [current] claim to be regarded as a true expert ~ because the Denialists would aim to counter by getting out a tape measure and saying [re old academic qualifications] "His is bigger than yours" .
Best to simply show that Lindzen is wrong here and wrong there and wrong almost everywhere. And to bypass the "expertise", in his case.
Please, just the facts, madam.
So we are left with Lindzens and Happers persistent errors or crazy opinions despite their qualifications. According to google gemini both are very suspicious of government regulations and over reach. I just think this is probably making them downplay the science. Impossible to prove of course. But I dont think its a coincidence that they have similar ideological leanings.
Nigelj @6 :
"Gubmint control and overreaching with regulations" is certainly the default outcry by American extreme rightwingers. To give them credit, that was a very reasonable position to take . . . 200 or 300 years ago. Though quite inappropriate in today's high-population hi-tech society.
[But I wander off-topic.]
And such outcries are too often a cover for mercenary self-interest. Possibly not much the case, with Lindzen and Happer ~ they are [IMO] more likely to have a mishmash of semi-subconscious motivations, like personal professional pique and a conservative's desire for clinging to the Good Old Days that they were familiar with. And suchlike.
Well, if you look at the ages of Lindzen and Happer (85 and 86, respectively), it's clear that they grew up during the strong anti-communist era in the US, post-WWII. In the 1950s and 60s, a huge part of the population was seeing a commie under every bed. Better dead than red.
I can easily imagine that this would have influenced their views on life. I certainly preserve some of the attitudes and principles of my parents and my times growing up. (Lindzen and Happer's birth dates fall about half way between those of my parents and my own. Close to a 20 year gap either way.) As I grew into adulthood, I did not expect to have to fight the environmental fights of the 60s and 70s again fifty years later. I'm sure that some people think they are still fighting the commies like McCarthy did in the 1950s.
Some people just like to go against the flow. Take the contrarian position, because they'd rather be a big fish in a small pond - rather than a small fish in a big pond.
And today, it's often all about click bait. The desire to be popular, to be adored, as if we were all still in grade school.
Bob Loblaw @8 :
Rogan for clickbait, to be sure. His ilk make a lot of dollars pandering to minorities. I dunno what their real thoughts are.
Lindzen & Happer ~ doubtless you are right. The pique of being passed over, and the desire to become a Big Fish again, no matter how small the pool. A confluence of many unworthy motives.
"but Lindzen seems to have botched this"
I can make the argument that Richard Lindzen set the discipline of atmospheric sciences down the wrong path for generations due to his failure to get the attribution correct on foundational climate behaviors. He claimed he was expert on atmospheric tides, having written a book called "Atmospheric Tides" in 1970. Yet, he missed pointing out that the enduring behavior of the equatorial stratosphere known as QBO was due to an obvious forcing attribution of interacting lunar and annual tides. In his research publications, Lindzen clearly stated that tidal forces had no effect on the QBO and other behaviors because he found that the math didn't agree. Unfortunately, his claim appeared so authoritarian to readers that no one ever followed up on his assertions and just assumed forcing was via some other resonant process.
Alas, this same missing tidal attribution has also been found to control mean sea-level variations over many decades in coastal sites, via similar careful cross-validation of models (starting in the Baltic, which has the most extensive record of MSL). This should not be surprising to find that tidal forces control what naively appears to be long-term tidal levels, yet the common explanation is non-tidal and unpredictable. This missed attribution is arguably also an artifact of Lindzen's original gaffe. Worse yet, the same tidal attribution can also be applied to the important climate behavior of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which is best described as an erratic cycling of atmospheric pressure. Further, the same model can be tuned slightly to match the cycles of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). And to cap it off, the same common-mode tidal forcing can be used to cross-validate predictive models of ENSO in the Pacific.
The power of these tidal models are reinforced by advancements in the solution of non-linear fluid dynamics. Admittedly, I wouldn't have as strong a thesis because most people would ascribe it all to over-fitting of curves, similar to what can happen with neural-net models. Yet the rigor of extensive cross-validation on real FD models shows none of the artifacts of arbitrary over-fitting.
Given all that, and Lindzen's poor track record in anthropogenic attributions to climate change, I consider it past due to reappraise all of natural climate variation with these tidal factors in mind.
BTW, I essentially have one peer-reviewed publication on this topic, which was comprehensively covered in a 2019 Wiley/AGU volume (also presented at several AGU and EGU conferences prior to publication).