WASHINGTON: A June 14 Facebook video features businessman Dan Peña discussing climate change during an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. In the edited video, Peña describes a purported meeting with scientists during a trip to the South Pole.
“We’re talking with all the goofball scientists and he said …. ‘55,000 years ago, it was 2 degrees warmer Celsius than it is today,'” Peña claims. “What? Stop. Fifty-five thousand years ago, it was two degrees warmer than it is today? And I said, ‘What about global warming?’ Simultaneously, all ten scientists started laughing. All ten PhDs from MIT, Caltech, Stanford started laughing.”
“Why’d they laugh?” Rogan asks. “Because global warming is a joke,” stated by Peña. The post has been shared 18,000 times in less than two weeks.
Scientific Evidence Contradicts Peña’s Claim
According to Gisela Winckler, a paleoceanographer at Columbia Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, evidence from sediments and ice core analysis shows that average temperatures on Earth were cooler 55,000 years ago. “It is not true that Earth was two degrees Celsius warmer 55,000 years ago than today,” Winckler stated in an email to an American newspaper. “Fifty-five thousand years ago the Earth was pretty much in the middle of the last glacial cycle, and temperatures were certainly colder than today.”
Darrell Kaufman, a paleoclimatologist at Northern Arizona University, published an article in The Conversation including a graph that shows global temperature change over the last 150,000 years. The graph, which incorporates temperature reconstructions from multiple studies, indicates that temperatures were cooler 55,000 years ago.
Additionally, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2021 that average global temperatures are now higher than they’ve been in the last 100,000 years.
