For the past few months, a bizarre climate claim has been circulating on TikTok, The Verge reports.
In April, TikTok announced that it would increase efforts to eliminate false climate information on its platform.
Recent viral videos on the app containing excerpts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" seemed like a perfect chance for TikTok to demonstrate its new policies, but as of The Verge's reporting in May, the offending clips had not been taken down, frustrating many viewers.
According to The Verge, the demonstrably false "Adam and Eve" theory shared in the videos comes from a 1965 book by Chan Thomas, meaning the theory came about before the widespread scientific study of Earth's rising temperature and has no evidence to support it.
The Adam and Eve theory states that every few thousand years, the Earth physically flips over and stops rotating, leading to catastrophic heating on the side facing the sun and horrifying 1,000-mile-per-hour winds, about six times as fast as a Category 5 hurricane. After six days of this, the Earth would supposedly flip back and keep going as usual.
NASA reports that there is absolutely no evidence to support the idea that this has ever happened or will ever happen in the future. This should be unsurprising, as Media Matters for America points out that the same book introducing this theory also stated that Jesus Christ spent 18 years in India before being carried away by aliens in a "space vehicle."
Instead, NASA explains that the Earth's magnetic poles occasionally flip, which means that compass needles would start to point south toward the Antarctic instead of north. But the Earth doesn't physically flip over when this happens, and it isn't responsible for any changes in Earth's climate — let alone a cataclysmic heating event.
Even the person quoted in these TikTok videos, YouTuber Jimmy Corsetti, who creates videos related to conspiracy theories and ancient mysteries like the lost city of Atlantis, does not back the Adam and Eve theory.
"Keep in mind that those various TikTok clips are edited portions of my conversation on the Joe Rogan Podcast where I am explaining the difference between 'mainstream scientific view' of Pole Shifts, in comparison to the 'Adam & Eve Story' — which is certainly not considered accepted science," he told The Verge in an email.
The article was shared to Reddit, where users were similarly incredulous about the meritless theory.
"It feels like they heard that the magnetic poles are due to flip … then they thought that means the Earth will actually flip on its axis," one Redditor summarized. "How do you get it so wrong?"
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