Scientists have found that, while Earth has gone through periods where it's been much hotter than it is now, it's the rate of warming that matters — and the speed of current warming is unprecedented in recent millennia. Modern warming is largely attributed to human activities, namely the burning of dirty fuels, which is trapping heat in the atmosphere.
However, there are still people who deny the scientific facts and believe the planet is simply going through another warming phase caused by natural factors. One such person is apparently Joe Rogan, who discussed the changing climate with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.
TikToker Environ.Economist (@iguanalow) shared a clip from the podcast and debunked the claim that Earth is actually in a cooling period and that the clean energy industry is taking advantage of people's concerns about rising temperatures to make money.
@iguanalow #climatedeniersbelike ♬ original sound - 🦎 Environ.Economist, Ph.D
In the podcast, Rogan mentioned an article by The Washington Post that cited a study on Earth's surface temperature over 485 million years, published in the journal Science. The authors found that previous mass extinction events were correlated with dramatic increases in carbon dioxide levels. And according to Jess Tierney, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona and co-author of the study, we're changing Earth's temperature at a rate even faster than the conditions that led to those events.
Rogan argued that "Earth's temperature has never been static," which is true. "It's always been up and down; there's been ice ages and heat waves," he continued. The creator explained that he's missing the point, because it's well-documented that Earth goes through cycles of varying temperatures.
"It's all about the way you frame things," she said, adding that these "heat waves" were more like long periods of intense temperatures, which often led to mass extinction events, such as one that occurred 250 million years ago. During that time, Earth's temperature rose by more than 18 degrees Fahrenheit in about 50,000 years. Humans are causing a comparable amount of warming in a fraction of the time, as geoscience and Earth science professor Uwe Brand told CBS News.
"Right now our emissions are 10 to 20 times higher than what happened at the end of the Permian mass extinction, which was the largest and biggest mass extinction," he said.
That also debunks another claim by Rogan, who said the data showed "we're in a cooling period." Without humans' disrupting the natural cycle, that would likely be the case since Earth's temperatures have been decreasing over 50 million years.
But temperatures have been going in the opposite direction since humans proliferated 300,000 years ago, with dramatic spikes since the late 1970s, making it clear that the main driver of rising temperatures is the release of massive amounts of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.
"My dad is like this. 'They just want us to switch to electric cars and solar to make money' and it's like...oil companies literally sell oil?" one commenter said. "And we KNOW that fossil fuels are, at minimum, carcinogenic and polluting? Like why are they like this?"
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"You know they didn't get past the title and the chart, and even with the chart, they both didn't look close enough to see the sharp short line up at the end, or that the slope is what we care about here," another person said.
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