Joe Rogan misleads on 'climate cooling' in Bernie Sanders interview
"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.
Image
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, a postdoctoral research fellow who studies climate-biogeochemistry 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.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
France 24
3 days ago
- France 24
'Silent killer': the science of tracing climate deaths in heatwaves
The figure was supposed to "grab some attention" and sound a timely warning in the hope of avoiding more needless deaths, said Friederike Otto, one of the scientists involved in the research. "We are still relatively early in the summer, so this will not have been the last heatwave. There is a lot that people and communities can do to save lives," Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, told AFP. Heat can claim tens of thousands of lives during European summers but it usually takes months, even years, to count the cost of this "silent killer". Otto and colleagues published their partial estimate just a week after temperatures peaked in western Europe. While the underlying methods were not new, the scientists said it was the first study to link heatwave deaths to climate change so soon after the event in question. Early mortality estimates could be misunderstood as official statistics but "from a public health perspective the benefits of providing timely evidence outweigh these risks," Raquel Nunes from the University of Warwick told AFP. "This approach could have transformative potential for both public understanding and policy prioritisation" of heatwaves, said Nunes, an expert on global warming and health who was not involved in the study. - Big deal - Science can show, with increasing speed and confidence, that human-caused climate change is making heatwaves hotter and more frequent. Unlike floods and fires, heat kills quietly, with prolonged exposure causing heat stroke, organ failure, and death. The sick and elderly are particularly vulnerable, but so are younger people exercising or toiling outdoors. But every summer, heat kills and Otto -- a pioneer in the field of attribution science -- started wondering if the message was getting through. "We have done attribution studies of extreme weather events and attribution studies of heatwaves for a decade... but as a society we are not prepared for these heatwaves," she said. "People think it's 30 (degrees Celsius) instead of 27, what's the big deal? And we know it's a big deal." When the mercury started climbing in Europe earlier this summer, scientists tweaked their approach. Joining forces, Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine chose to spotlight the lethality -- not just the intensity -- of the heat between June 23 and July 2. Combining historic weather and published mortality data, they assessed that climate change made the heatwave between 1C and 4C hotter across 12 cities, depending on location, and that 2,300 people had likely perished. But in a notable first, they estimated that 65 percent of these deaths -- around 1,500 people across cities including London, Paris, and Athens -- would not have occurred in a world without global warming. "That's a much stronger message," said Otto. "It brings it much closer to home what climate change actually means and makes it much more real and human than when you say this heatwave would have been two degrees colder." Underestimated threat The study was just a snapshot of the wider heatwave that hit during western Europe's hottest June on record and sent temperatures soaring to 46C in Spain and Portugal. The true toll was likely much higher, the authors said, noting that heat deaths are widely undercounted. Since then Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria have suffered fresh heatwaves and deadly wildfires. Though breaking new ground, the study has not been subject to peer review, a rigorous assessment process that can take more than a year. Otto said waiting until after summer to publish -- when "no one's talking about heatwaves, no one is thinking about keeping people safe" -- would defeat the purpose. "I think it's especially important, in this context, to get the message out there very quickly." The study had limitations but relied on robust and well-established scientific methodology, several independent experts told AFP. Tailoring this approach to local conditions could help cities better prepare when heatwaves loom, Abhiyant Tiwari, a health and climate expert who worked on India's first-ever heat action plan, told AFP. "I definitely see more such studies coming out in the future," said Tiwari from NRDC India. Otto said India, which experiences tremendously hot summers, was a "prime candidate" and with a template in place it was likely more studies would soon follow.
France 24
3 days ago
- France 24
EU urged to act on forests' faltering absorption of carbon
Forests, which cover 40 percent of the European Union's territory, are expected to play a crucial role in efforts to meet targets for overall reductions of the bloc's emissions of planet-warming gases. But human and climate pressures, from logging to extreme weather and insect attacks, means their ability to absorb CO2 is "rapidly declining", according to an article, led by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre. "Reversing the decline in European forests' ability to store carbon is essential -- and still possible -- with bold, science-based action today," said co-author Giacomo Grassi, who is a member of the UN's IPCC expert task force on greenhouse gas inventories. Solutions include rapid reductions in carbon emissions, combined with efforts to improve management to make forests more resilient to climate impacts, and comprehensive monitoring. Many European countries still rely on periodic inventories, which cannot keep up with rapid changes to forest health. The authors emphasize the need to better understand forest dynamics. They call in particular for better measuring of carbon flows between the soil, vegetation, and atmosphere, as well as improving predictions of how extreme weather will affect carbon sinks in the future. 'Steeper decline' The research looked at official 2024 data showing that the amount carbon absorbed by Europe's forests, ecosystems and changes to land use plummeted by around a third in the 2020 to 2022 period, compared to 2010 to 2014. The authors said 2025 figures "suggest an even steeper decline". "This trend, combined with the declining climate resilience of European forests, indicates that the EU's climate targets, which rely on an increasing carbon sink, might be at risk," the authors said. Earlier this week another study in the Nature journal Communications Earth & Environment found that land accounts for a quarter of global emissions reductions in countries' climate plans and warned that a lack of funding and conservation focus was putting these in jeopardy. Piers Forster, Director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at Leeds University, who was not involved in Wednesday's study said it underscores the urgent need to slash emissions across the board. "We can't bet our future on carbon removal -- either from planting more trees, from protecting forests, or from emerging technologies such as direct air capture and storage -- without understanding what is already happening to the land and natural systems," he said. Scientists have warned that it is still unclear how carbon sinks might behave as the planet warms in future, and exactly how much heat-trapping carbon dioxide they might soak up from the atmosphere. In April, research by Climate Analytics, a policy institute that independently assesses countries' climate plans, warned that major economies are overstating how much carbon their forests can absorb in a climate accounting fudge that could allow them to use even more fossil fuels.
Fashion Network
3 days ago
- Fashion Network
Durability of clothes is by no means correlated with price, study finds
By comparing 47 T-shirts sold by British brands, Leeds University has found that associating clothes' prices with their physical durability is no longer significant, as the most resistant garments are those sold at mid-market prices. The study was conducted by the Leeds University Institute of Textiles and Colour (LITAC) in association with UK NGO Wrap. Researchers subjected 47 men's and women's T-shirts by brands from the budget to the luxury end of the market (priced up to £395 each) to a series of tests, ranging from an analysis of their physical properties to 50 successive washing cycles at 30° C. The result was scientific confirmation of something many consumers have already discovered: price doesn't guarantee garment quality, or it no longer can. The T-shirt found to be the most resistant retailed at £28. Among the 10 best T-shirts, no less than six were selling for less than £15. The study concluded that well-designed, 100% cotton T-shirts can last a long time. Four among the 10 best models analysed fell into this category. However, cotton T-shirts tend to shrink more than others when washed. 'For circularity in fashion to be really effective, [physical] durability must be a priority,' said Dr Eleanor Scott of LITAC. 'Durability lies at the heart of the re-use and resale market, and also helps us keep the items we love for longer. Above all, these findings show that durability isn't a luxury reserved to the privileged few, but that it is accessible at all prices,' she added. The study has been published at a time when the European textile industry is zeroing in on very low-price products, and generally those with a brief life cycle, sold in the EU by Chinese e-tailers. Also, the EU is currently seeking to clarify (by examining recycled fabrics, environmental damage caused and other elements) how physical and extrinsic durability can coexist in an analysis of textile products' sustainability.
