Five Ways Joe Rogan Misleads His Audience on Climate Change

Joe Rogan’s Climate Misinformation Playbook Exposed by Researchers

Popular podcast host Joe Rogan, who commands a following of over 50 million across platforms, has repeatedly spread climate misinformation on his show, according to research from cognitive scientists studying the phenomenon.

In an October episode, Rogan interviewed Richard Lindzen and William Happer, two octogenarian climate contrarians who have been propagating climate myths since at least 2012. The trio discussed numerous debunked theories and conspiracy claims for over two hours, many identical to arguments Lindzen and Happer presented more than a decade ago.

This pattern reflects a concerning trend. A recent Yale Climate Connections report found that about one in five U.S. adults and 37% of adults under 30 regularly get news from social media influencers, potentially exposing them to a high volume of climate misinformation.

John Cook, a cognitive scientist at the University of Melbourne specializing in climate misinformation, explained that audiences can protect themselves by recognizing five common techniques used to distort climate science—what he calls “FLICC”: fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry-picking, and conspiracy theories.

“Once people spot it in one topic, they can spot it in another,” Cook noted in an interview. He recently co-authored a book chapter outlining these tactics with Dominik Stecula.

Rogan’s podcast episodes discussing climate change frequently demonstrate all five techniques. When hosting Lindzen and Happer, Rogan promoted “fake experts” whose claims lack scientific credibility. While Happer is a retired physicist with minimal publication history in climate science, Lindzen, despite his publication record, has made contrarian claims consistently refuted by subsequent research.

For example, Lindzen’s “adaptive iris” hypothesis from 2001, which he referenced on the show, suggested that warming would cause high-elevation clouds to contract like an iris, allowing more heat to escape and dampening global warming. Multiple studies have since identified flaws in this theory, with current research indicating clouds will likely amplify global warming slightly—yet Lindzen continues promoting this debunked concept.

Rogan also employs logical fallacies. In a June episode with Senator Bernie Sanders, he claimed that because Earth’s climate has naturally changed in the past, current climate change must also be natural—equivalent to arguing that because lightning causes some wildfires, arson cannot exist.

The podcast host frequently sets impossible expectations, suggesting climate models must be perfect to be trusted. In reality, climate models have predicted global warming with remarkable accuracy for decades, while contrarians like Lindzen have been consistently wrong. In 1989, Lindzen claimed Earth had barely warmed over the prior century and would hardly warm further in the next—a prediction demonstrably contradicted by subsequent temperature records.

Cherry-picking is another tactic evident in Rogan’s climate discussions. During his conversation with Senator Sanders, he misrepresented a Washington Post article about research by Smithsonian and University of Arizona researcher Emily Judd. Rogan claimed the study found “we’re in a cooling period,” calling it “a very inconvenient discovery.” However, the article actually explained that while temperatures declined for about 50 million years until around 300,000 years ago, they stabilized as modern humans evolved, and today’s warming rate is unprecedented.

As Judd told the Washington Post: “In the same way as a massive asteroid hitting the Earth, what we’re doing now is unprecedented.”

The most prevalent technique in Rogan’s climate discussions involves conspiracy theories. He frequently implies that climate-concerned individuals are unthinking followers who haven’t done research, neglecting that deferring to an expert consensus on complex topics is reasonable—especially when over 99% of experts agree that modern climate change is real and human-caused.

Conspiracy thinking requires assuming nefarious intent. Rogan repeatedly mentions money spent on clean energy transition while omitting that fossil fuel companies rank among the world’s most profitable corporations and spent approximately $219 million in the 2024 U.S. election—about 100 times more than clean energy political action committees.

Cook and psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky have identified seven traits of conspiratorial thinking: contradictory beliefs, overriding suspicion, assumptions of nefarious intent, conviction that something must be wrong, claims of persecution, immunity to evidence, and reinterpreting randomness.

“What my psychology research has continued to reinforce and replicate is the effectiveness of technique-based inoculation,” Cook explained. “Build public resilience against misinformation by explaining the techniques that misinformation uses to distort the facts.”

By recognizing these patterns, audiences can better distinguish between evidence-based climate science and misleading claims—an increasingly important skill in today’s media landscape.