A conversation between Joe Rogan and Mel Gibson summed up 2025 for me – and not in a good way |
Looking back on this crazy year, one event, right at the start, seems to me to encapsulate the whole. In January, recording his podcast in a studio in Austin, Texas, the host, Joe Rogan, and the actor Mel Gibson merrily dissed climate science. At the same time, about 1,200 miles away in California, Gibson’s $14m home was being incinerated in the Palisades wildfire. In this and other respects, their discussion could be seen as prefiguring the entire 12 months.
The loss of his house hadn’t been confirmed at the time of the interview, but Gibson said his son had just sent him “a video of my neighbourhood, and it’s in flames. It looks like an inferno.” According to World Weather Attribution, January’s fires in California were made significantly more likely by climate breakdown. Factors such as the extreme lack of rainfall and stronger winds made such fires both more likely to happen and more intense than they would have been without human-caused global heating.
There’s a widespread belief that people will wake up to climate breakdown when disasters affect them. It’s equivalent to the claim that “there were no atheists in the trenches” of the first world war (if you believe this, you haven’t read Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man: “Standing in that dismal ditch, I could find no consolation in the thought that Christ was risen”). For some people, disaster seems to provoke a doubling down. If your entire worldview is challenged by events, it’s tempting to conclude the events are at fault.
Halfway through the interminable interview, Gibson, while disputing evolution, launched a typically detailed attack on the scientific method. “Yeah, well, there’s a lot of money in, you know, claims, and I don’t know.” Anyway, he mused: “What........