And Lindzen, still 🤦🏻‍♂️

Haha I wish that were true, although surveys do indicate Rogan has a pretty significantly negative net approval rating, at least among 18 to 29-year-olds.

ugh, typo, that should obviously be 485M years, not billion 🤦‍♂️

So where does this leave us? Back to Cook:

“What my psychology research has continued to reinforce and replicate is the effectiveness of technique-based inoculation. Build public resilience against misinformation by explaining the techniques that misinformation uses to distort the facts" (11/11)

Cook's Conspiracy Theory Handbook with @lewan.bsky.social documented 7 traits of Conspiratorial thinking:

Contradictory
Overriding suspicion
Nefarious intent
Something must be wrong
Persecuted Victim
Immune to evidence
Re-interpreting randomness

CONSPIR was in abundance on Rogan's show too (10/11)

But most of all, Rogan relies on Conspiracy theorizing, saying the existence of an expert consensus and big green money should make us suspicious of the science. He somehow omits that many fossil fuel companies are among the most profitable in the world & make massive political contributions (9/11)

Rogan has also on several episodes cherry-picked & grossly misrepresented a paleoclimate study discussed in a 2024 Washington Post article. He says it showed that we're in a cooling period. The article itself noted that the planet is now warming faster than at any time in the past 485B years (8/11)

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, but in reality, climate models have been remarkably accurate, unlike predictions from contrarians like Lindzen (7/11)

Rogan's favorite Logical fallacy is also the #1 most popular myth we identified @skepticalscience.bsky.social: that climate changed naturally in the past. Of course it did, and humans are currently changing the climate at a rate more than 20x faster. Lightning sparks wildfires; so does arson (6/11)

Rogan's recent episodes have exemplified all five characteristics. Happer and Lindzen are Fake experts. Happer is a retired physicist with a scant publication record on climate science. Lindzen has a long publication record – he's just been consistently proven wrong over the past four decades (5/11)

I talked to @johnfocook.bsky.social about dealing with climate misinformation, and he recommended learning about the common techniques that bad actors use to distort facts:

Fake experts
Logical fallacies
Impossible expectations
Cherry-picking
Conspiracy theories

or FLICC, for short (4/11)

In any case, my @climateconnections.bsky.social article focuses on the psychology & climate denial techniques on display in the show, but at @skepticalscience.bsky.social I also did a brief debunking of 19 of the climate myths raised by Rogan, Lindzen, and Happer if that's your cup of tea ☕️ (3/11)

Side note – I wonder how two retired scientists in their mid-80s who aren't doing any new research or saying anything different than they were well over a decade ago get onto Joe Rogan's radar, let alone an invitation to be featured guests on an over two-hourlong show. So strange 🤔 (2/11)