Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson has revealed that the academic inspiration behind his climate ramblings on Joe Rogan‘s podcast this past week was from none other than S Fred Singer.
Singer was a physicist whose work was funded by oil giant ExxonMobil. He was also supported by the Koch family, who infamously own mineral and fuel extraction company Kick Inustries. Singer passed away in 2020.
First, let’s do a cheeky little recap of why we’ve gathered you all here today.
Earlier this week, Peterson appeared as a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience. One topic covered in the four-hour and thirteen-minute-long episode was climate change. Oh boy, here we fkn go.
One clip from the climate convo went absolutely viral in the days following the episode. We promise it’s not a Saturday Night Live sketch and is in fact, real.
Feel free to punish yourself with the following 49 seconds of video and audio chaos below.
Holy moly. I don’t think I can do this. First words out of Peterson’s mouth in the Joe Rogan interview are complete self parody. I can’t even dunk on it. pic.twitter.com/hIDYPi0KDc
— bad_stats 🕜💵🖨️🕣 (@thebadstats) January 25, 2022
“Another problem that bedevils climate modelling, too, which is that as you stretch out the models across time, the errors increase radically,” Peterson says.
“And so maybe you can predict out a week or three weeks or a month or a year, but the farther out you predict, the more your model is in error.
“And that’s a huge problem when you’re trying to model over 100 years because the errors compound just like interest.”
Unsurprisingly, actual climate scientists came out swinging to set the record straight.
One such academic was Professor John Abraham from the University of St Thomas in Minnesota who labelled the chat as “a word salad of nonsense spoken by people who have no sense when it comes to climate”.
“It’s as if someone, with zero expertise and knowledge, made comments about something he knows little about,” he said as per The Guardian.
However, there has been a recent development to this spicy tale courtesy of Peterson’s Twitter account yesterday where he tweeted a link to Singer’s book.
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) January 27, 2022
DeSmog has published an extensive report on Singer’s continual habit of pocketing dollarydoos from fossil fuel corporations and other climate denying interest groups.
One particularly damning section from the article alleges Singer got USD $5,000 a month from the Heartland Institute – a right-wing, climate-denying American think-tank which has taken donations from the Koch family and Exxon-Mobil.
He was also a speaker at the 2012 Heartland conference where sponsors snagged $67 mil from Exxon and Koch among others.
Singer also wrote an article arguing that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is still yet to “provide proof for significant human-caused climate change”.
You can read DeSmog’s the full article here.
This isn’t the first time Peterson has twisted himself into a logical pretzel on the world stage.
Australian comedian Jim Jefferies weaved Peterson into his web during an interview on his show.
Remember when Jordan Peterson’s flawed logic was tied in a knot by Jim Jeffries 🤡 pic.twitter.com/D4t6iuakP1
— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) January 26, 2022
The Joe Rogan Experience podcast has been a hotbed for controversy lately. Most recently, 270 scientists penned an open letter to Spotify asking that Rogan’s broadcasts be somewhat censored due to misinformation as per Rolling Stone.
