As Wildfires Intensify, Climate Lies Endanger Lives, Report Warns
A new report by the Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) coalition reveals that social media platforms are failing to curb the spread of climate falsehoods during extreme weather events like wildfires and heatwaves. Despite repeated warnings, online influencers, partisan media, and political figures are recycling false claims, attributing fires to arson or poor management, and dismissing heatwaves as normal weather. This disinformation, often fueled by fossil-fuel interests and amplified by platform algorithms, is described as lethal, drowning out critical public safety information and hindering emergency responses. Experts emphasize that this is a "predictable failure" by tech companies, who prioritize engagement over public well-being. Solutions include prebunking campaigns and direct communication channels from emergency services, as reliable information becomes a public safety necessity.
As wildfires sweep Europe and North America, falsehoods about their causes and the nature of climate change are spreading like, well, wildfire.
According to a report by the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition (CAAD), social media platforms have allowed predictable disinformation about wildfires and heatwaves to spread widely, despite repeated warnings that the same narratives would return.
The analysis, “A Summer of Extreme Lies: Heatwave and Wildfire Climate Disinformation in 2026”, shows how online influencers, partisan media and political figures are recycling false claims that wildfires are caused mainly by arson or poor forest management; that heatwaves were ordinary seasonal weather; and that climate scientists and journalists are exaggerating risks to advance political agendas.
That’s no trivial matter: as CAAD’s communications co-chair Philip Newell tells me, disinformation in times of crisis can be lethal. “The lies are drowning out the vital information people need to survive these extreme events,” Newell says. He cites a particularly prominent instance, traced in a report following the 2025 LA wildfires, in which posts about the fires by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on X received far more views than official emergency response guidance.
The findings follow warnings in June 2026 from CAAD and the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) that extreme weather events were likely to be used to spread familiar falsehoods. In the weeks that followed, the report says, climate-linked heatwaves and worsening wildfire conditions in Europe and North America provided a new opening for disinformation actors.
Genevieve Guenther, a disinformation expert and author of The Language of Climate Politics, says the striking similarity of wildfire narratives across right-wing media, political figures and prominent climate contrarians suggested that talking points were being distributed through a wider political ecosystem.
“The goal of this misinformation is two-fold,” Guenther says. “First, it deflects attention away from climate change and towards problems that have nothing to do with climate, such as arson, making it seem as if climate change plays no role in a particular wildfire. Second, it suggests that we can do things that contain or even prevent wildfires,” even as climate-driven heat and drought create conditions that overwhelm existing firefighting capacity.
The report identifies several recurring patterns. In North America, smoke from Canadian wildfires prompted claims that blame lay with Canadian leaders or forest mismanagement, rather than with climate conditions that increase fire risk. Some posts escalated into violent rhetoric, including extreme comments about retaliation against Canada. In the U.K., the report says wildfire discussions repeatedly centred on arson, net zero policies and accusations of media alarmism. Across parts of Europe, heatwave coverage was used to challenge climate science, attack renewable energy and frame extreme heat as either harmless or politically exaggerated.
The analysis also highlights Portuguese- and Spanish-language conversations around the Iberian heatwave, where denialist narratives included claims of alarmism, doubt about the link between high temperatures and global warming, and suggestions of deliberate weather manipulation. In one example, Portuguese-language heatwave posts containing climate denialist narratives had an estimated reach of more than 4.7 million views.
Philip Newell argues climate disinformation should not be treated only as a problem of false belief, but as a product of platform incentives. Newell says fossil-fuel interests have long used disinformation to undermine climate action, while social media algorithms that reward engagement had created “a secondary market for climate lies” because viral posts generate advertising revenue.
One highlight of CAAD’s report focuses on “participatory disinformation,” a term coined by political researcher Kate Starbird. In the wildfire context, fossil-fuel-aligned voices and political actors set the frame, while ordinary users fill it in with screenshots, memes, jokes, anecdotes and supposed “evidence”. The result can feel organic, but it pushes the conversation in a direction that serves oil and gas interests: away from fossil fuel pollution and toward confusion over arson, forest management, green policy or alleged media exaggeration.
The public safety stakes, Newell argues, are immediate. Recent research has shown how false claims can crowd out official guidance during extreme weather events, hampering emergency services’ efforts, and leaving people less able to find reliable information about smoke, heat, and evacuation routes.
Disinformation can also redirect anger away from the causes of emergencies and towards those who are trying to help. In extreme cases, falsehoods can even contribute to threats against emergency responders. “Climate mis- and disinformation should now be considered a hurdle for every disaster response,” Newell says.
The report’s key finding is around the recurrence of familiar false narratives after platforms had already been warned to expect them. That pattern matters because it weakens the argument that platforms are merely reacting to unpredictable outbreaks of falsehoods. The Brandwatch figures offer only a partial snapshot of online conversation, and CAAD notes that the tool disproportionately captures activity on X. But the qualitative evidence is harder to dismiss: the same claims are appearing across different crises, regions and languages, often at moments when people are searching for reliable information about heat, smoke, fire risk and public safety.
The result is less a mystery of misinformation than a failure to prepare. If civil society groups can identify the narratives before they reappear, then social media companies with far greater data access and enforcement capacity should be able to anticipate them too. The accountability question, the report suggests, is not whether every post can be stopped, but why known patterns of climate disinformation continue to be amplified during emergencies where confusion can carry real public-health consequences.
Newell says that onus ought to be on the social media platforms to clean up their act. “If it’s not their intention to amplify harmful content then they should make product decisions that stop amplifying harmful content,” he tells me. “If Big Tech can't keep their customers safe, then they shouldn't exist.”
Queries I sent to the social media platform X about CAAD’s findings went unanswered. A spokesperson from the PR firm Edelman, which represents Meta and its sites Facebook, Instagram and Threads, declined to answer questions about the CAAD report, instead referring me to Meta’s misinformation policies.
Genevieve Guenther explains that reducing the harm caused by disinformation requires preparation before disasters dominate the news cycle. Trusted messengers, including climate scientists, forest agencies, environmental groups and elected officials, should “inoculate the public against viral falsehoods” by explaining common claims and the links between climate change and wildfire risk in advance, she says.
NGOs such as the European Digital Media Observatory see such digital literacy campaigns as a way of giving the public the tools they need to dismiss disinformation in their day-to-day lives, as well as during important events. One such campaign, aimed at young voters during the 2024 U.K. general election, demonstrably improved media literacy skills by teaching “prebunking” techniques, and was able to show that people retained those skills and developed resilience against media manipulation.
“Social media can no longer be considered an effective and cheap method for reaching the general public, as their feeds have been thoroughly poisoned by those spreading disinformation,” Newell says. He believes that officials must find other routes to communicate with those at risk. “Emergency response officials should build tools to connect directly with impacted communities, without having to rely on third-party companies whose aim is making money, not protecting the public,” he tells me.
The issue is no longer whether climate disinformation will appear during extreme weather: it will. The question is whether policymakers will start treating it as part of the risk environment. As heatwaves, wildfires and smoke events become more frequent and severe, reliable information is becoming a public-safety necessity. Disinformation, spreading unchecked, is making that harder to deliver.