Joe Rogan misleads on 'climate cooling' in Bernie Sanders interview

"Did you see the Washington Post piece that they wrote?" Rogan said in the June 24, 2025 episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience," one of the most-streamed podcasts in the United States (archived here).

"Essentially, they found that we're in a cooling period, that the Earth over the past X amount of years, and this was, like, a very inconvenient discovery, but they had to report the data, and kudos to them for doing that."

Rogan -- whose show has frequently amplified misinformation on health, politics and climate change -- was referencing a September 19, 2024 article in the Washington Post about a scientific effort to map the history of Earth's climate over the past 485 million years (archived here).

Multiple accounts shared the clip across platforms in late June, gathering millions of views.

"NEW: Joe Rogan fact checks Senator Bernie Sanders after he tried shaming people who think Climate Change is a hoax," says one such post shared June 24 on X.

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A screenshot of an X post taken on July 3, 2025

But Rogan's interpretation of the research discussed in the article is misleading, scientists including one of the study's co-authors told AFP.

The study's findings neither disprove nor question the reality that modern warming is happening at a record pace due to human activity.

The 2024 study from paleoclimate research scientist Emily Judd and other researchers, titled "A 485-million-year history of Earth's surface temperature", in fact "highlights the urgency of modern climate change," said Laura Larocca, an assistant professor at Arizona State University's School of Ocean Futures (archived here, here and here).

"While Earth was much hotter during ancient greenhouse periods, humans have only ever lived during relatively cooler climate phases. Today, the pace of human-driven warming is exceptionally rapid," she told AFP July 3, reiterating a point made clear in the Washington Post article.

The newspaper reported that the study "revealed a history of wild shifts and far hotter temperatures than scientists previously realized -- offering a reminder of how much change the planet has already endured and a warning about the unprecedented rate of warming caused by humans." 

It also emphasized: "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."

'Cooling period'?

Geological records over hundreds of millions of years show global temperatures have reached both lower and higher levels than those currently observed, but these changes happened extremely slowly in comparison to the modern pace of warming.

British scientist Dan Lunt, a co-author of the study, told AFP on July 1 that past phases of warming occurred "so slowly that they are essentially undetectable on the timescale of a human lifetime" (archived here).

By contrast, the environmental nonprofit Climate Central have estimated that for Millenials and Gen Z -- which the organization defined as people born between the 1981 and 2012 -- could experience up to two times more warming over the course of their lives than Baby Boomers -- those born between 1948 and 1962 -- under a scenario of medium to high emissions (archived here).

Kevin Anchukaitis, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona and the spouse of one of the study co-authors, told AFP on July 2 that while humans built civilization during a "relatively cool geological period" in history, modern emissions are rapidly affecting Earth's systems (archived here).

Climate models predict warming to continue for decades under all emission scenarios, and the effects of human activities on Earth's climate to date have become irreversible (archived here).

Even the most striking examples of warming in ancient climate events do not compare to today's rapid progression, said Gordon Inglis, an associate professor at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom (archived here).

CO2 correlation

The study's timeline of the Earth's hot temperature history should in fact provide more reason to worry about climate change, scientists said.

Inglis noted that the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which occurred 56 million years ago and is considered as a rapidly-warming phase in Earth's history, was directly tied to an increase in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere (archived here).

He said this phase gives scientists a glimpse of what could happen with the modern climate, as the PETM was associated with global warming, ocean acidification, and at least one major extinction event.

The study confirms ties between Earth's temperatures and levels of CO2, explained Anchukaitis.

The paper "actually reinforces the primary role that carbon dioxide plays in setting the temperature of the Earth," he told AFP.

A report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change adds: "It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land" (archived here). 

Read more of AFP's reporting on climate misinformation and disinformation here.