Joe Rogan sits atop one of the world’s most powerful media platforms, with tens of millions of followers spread across YouTube, Spotify and Instagram. When he talks about climate change, he is not just riffing into the void — he is shaping how a generation understands the greatest emergency of our time. That is why his October episode with two elderly climate contrarians, Richard Lindzen and William Happer, is so alarming: for more than two hours, the trio re-hashed myths that scientists have painstakingly debunked for decades, just as climate-fueled extremes are accelerating around the globe.

The problem is not only that the claims are wrong, but that they follow a proven playbook. Cognitive scientist John Cook and colleagues have spent years studying how science denial works across topics like climate, vaccines and tobacco. In a recent chapter and related work, they describe five recurring techniques: fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry-picking, and conspiracy theories. They summarize this as FLICC — a simple checklist ordinary listeners can use to spot when someone is trying to bend reality rather than describe it.

Fake experts are the first warning sign. Rather than inviting active climate researchers whose work shapes the scientific consensus, Rogan often turns to fringe voices. William Happer is a retired physicist with little publication record in climate science. Richard Lindzen once contributed important research decades ago, but his contrarian claims have repeatedly failed against newer evidence. On Rogan’s show, Lindzen again promoted his old “adaptive iris” idea — the notion that certain high-altitude clouds will shrink as the planet warms, allowing more heat to escape and softening global warming. Subsequent studies found serious flaws in that hypothesis and concluded that, overall, clouds are more likely to slightly amplify warming than cancel it out. Yet the podcast presented Lindzen as a truth-telling maverick rather than someone whose big alternative theory has not held up.

Logical fallacies are another staple. In a separate episode with Senator Bernie Sanders, Rogan argued that because Earth’s climate has always changed naturally, today’s warming must also be natural. This sounds plausible until you notice the missing step: past natural changes do not tell us anything about what is driving current trends. It is like saying that because some wildfires are started by lightning, arson must not exist. Today’s rapid warming matches the physics of greenhouse gases and the observed surge in fossil fuel pollution — not volcanic eruptions or changes in the sun.

Rogan and his guests also lean heavily on impossible expectations. They dismiss climate models as “wrong” or “unreliable,” suggesting that unless scientists can predict the future with near-perfect precision, their warnings should be ignored. In reality, climate models have done a remarkably good job over the past half-century at projecting how much the planet would heat in response to rising emissions. Independent assessments comparing old projections with observed temperature records show that most models landed very close to what has actually happened. By contrast, prominent contrarians have repeatedly forecast minimal warming or even cooling — and have been consistently contradicted by the data. Demanding absolute certainty before acting is not scientific rigor; it is a recipe for paralysis.

Cherry-picking is where Rogan’s platform can be especially misleading. In his conversation with Sanders, he referenced a Washington Post article about a study led by Emily Judd that reconstructed global temperatures over the last 485 million years. Rogan told listeners that the study showed we are “in a cooling period” and that this finding was “very inconvenient.” But that is not what the paper concluded. Judd and her co-authors found that global temperatures gradually declined over tens of millions of years until roughly 300,000 years ago, then stabilized around levels in which modern humans evolved. Against that long backdrop, the current spike in temperatures — driven by burning coal, oil and gas — is incredibly abrupt. The study’s own authors stressed that nothing in their reconstruction resembles the speed of today’s warming. By plucking out one partial detail and ignoring the main result, the show turned a warning into a comfort story.

When those tactics are not enough, conspiracy theories fill the gaps. Rogan frequently suggests that the scientific consensus on climate change is the product of groupthink, censorship or hidden financial motives. On air, he has implied that researchers who question mainstream findings are denied grants or blacklisted from universities, while those who support “the narrative” are showered with funding. This ignores the fact that Lindzen himself enjoyed a long career at MIT and published hundreds of papers in major journals, including many that argued against the consensus. It also misrepresents how science works: researchers are rewarded for overturning accepted wisdom when their alternative explanations are backed by strong evidence. If someone could show that humans are not driving the current warming, they would be celebrated, not silenced — but no such evidence has stood up to scrutiny.

Psychologists Stephan Lewandowsky and John Cook describe a cluster of traits that define conspiratorial thinking: constantly shifting claims, deep suspicion of institutions, assumption of evil intent, casting oneself as a persecuted victim, and treating any counter-evidence as part of the cover-up. Their “Conspiracy Theory Handbook” notes that these patterns can appear on any topic, from vaccines to climate. When Rogan suggests that nearly all climate scientists, major academies, and international assessments are either corrupt or brainwashed, he invites his audience into that worldview — one where a handful of podcast guests are more trustworthy than thousands of experts whose work has been independently reviewed and replicated.

The reality is far more straightforward, and far more urgent. Multiple lines of evidence show that human activities, mainly the burning of fossil fuels, are heating the planet. Surveys of the scientific literature find that well over 99% of recent climate studies agree on this basic point. Major scientific bodies and agencies, from national academies to NASA, have repeatedly confirmed the same conclusion. Meanwhile, attribution studies link the rising frequency and intensity of deadly heatwaves, mega-fires, floods and droughts directly to this human-driven warming. Each extra fraction of a degree locks in more suffering.

This is why climate misinformation on mega-platforms is not a harmless intellectual game. When Rogan frames the clean-energy transition as a suspicious money grab, he rarely mentions that fossil fuel firms remain among the most profitable entities on Earth, or that they have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into lobbying and elections to slow climate policy. While his guests cast doubt on climate science, communities are already paying the price: crop failures, collapsed power grids, and mass displacement driven by extremes that would have been vanishingly rare in a cooler world.

So what can be done? Cook’s research suggests that simply throwing more facts at misinformation is rarely enough. A more promising approach is “inoculation”: teaching people the common techniques of denial before they encounter them, so the tricks are easier to spot in real time. When listeners learn about FLICC — fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry-picking and conspiracy theories — they start to recognize those patterns across different issues. That mental toolkit makes it harder for any single influencer, however charismatic, to drag them away from reality.

Joe Rogan is unlikely to turn his show into a climate-science seminar anytime soon. But his audience does not have to wait for him to change. They can seek out credible sources, follow actual climate scientists, and treat spectacular contrarian claims with healthy skepticism. And platforms like Spotify, which profit from Rogan’s reach, can stop pretending that amplifying climate denial to millions is a neutral act. In a decade that will largely determine whether the world stays within relatively safer temperature limits or races toward unmanageable chaos, letting misinformation dominate the loudest microphones is a luxury the climate system — and the people living in it — simply cannot afford.