In June 2026, the Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) coalition warned about the “predictable” wildfire lies we could expect to see, unless social media companies took action to limit the spread of harmful falsehoods that have repeatedly accompanied major wildfire events in previous years.
The following day, the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) warned about heatwave disinformation becoming “a trend. Extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, are regularly used to spread disinformation. Narratives are repeatedly the same.”
If major tech platforms had wanted to prevent another surge of climate disinformation, they had ample warning.
Instead, in the weeks that followed, a heatwave made possible only by climate change and a wildfire season worsened by climate change provided disinfluencers another opportunity to recycle familiar false narratives. The same false narratives resurfaced across social media, demonstrating that the patterns identified by CAAD and EDMO remain entrenched despite years of evidence and repeated warnings.
This report documents how climate disinformation spread during these events, recurring narratives that dominated online conversations, and the role social media platforms played in allowing those narratives to reach millions of users despite advance warning that they would emerge.
Climate change is already making extreme weather more frequent, more intense, and more dangerous. The public should not also have to contend with social media platforms amplifying falsehoods that undermine public understanding and can put lives at risk. We don’t have to tolerate social media companies making it harder to protect lives during these increasingly dangerous and destructive events.
Extreme weather is becoming more dangerous as the climate changes. The online information environment should help people understand these events, not make them harder to navigate. This report shows the persistence of predictable climate disinformation is not simply a consequence of polarized debate, it is the result of repeated platform failures that policymakers can no longer afford to ignore.
American Wildfire Smoke Response: Blame Canada, Then Nuke ‘em
In July 2026, wildfire darkened Canadian skies and sent smoke into the US triggering the predictable pattern of online lies about climate change-worsened extreme weather, and its effect on air quality in the Northern United States.
However, this July the time frame involved was different than past years. These false narratives were spread within days of reports that wildfire smoke was permeating the border and affecting American cities, skipping the usual trend of a gradual build-up into more extremist content and launching straight into conspiracy claims even faster than usual.
Though the speed was quicker than in past seasons, the narratives themselves were similar as blame for the climate-worsened events was shifted to local leaders and the conspiracy theories about intentional arson were algorithmically amplified, as expected given the memetic and participatory nature of digital disinformation.
“Participatory Disinformation” describes how elites set a disinformation frame, from the top-down, that social media posters then work to find evidence for and otherwise justify, initially coined by Kate Starbird in reference to election disinformation.
In climate disinformation, elite partisans and public relations professionals provide an initial frame for spinning the reality of climate change by blaming climate concerned politicians or activists who are talking about climate solutions for failing to instead prevent the wildfires.
Some US Republicans, like Trump-endorsed candidate for governor of Michigan John James, called for Canada to “take real action” (without specifying what that would be, and presumably not swift action to address the fossil fuel use causing the climate change that’s worsening the fires.)
Social media posters, however, have begun pushing beyond the sort of language claiming “climate change is a political agenda” into increasingly violent rhetoric, using humor as cover and plausible deniability for laundering extremism.
While CAAD has documented an increase in violent rhetoric targeting protestors and land defenders in recent years, the calls for individual violence have gone nuclear-literally.
One X user posted that “if the air quality in the northeast US goes down even 1% due to canada not being able to get their wildfires under control, america should brutally nuke every canadian city as retribution.”
This user, though joking and with only a relatively small number of likes and comments, represents the extreme end of an increasingly common spectrum of violent rhetoric, and even beyond the replies agreeing and going further, was not the only poster suggesting violence in response to the impact of climate change being described as a failure of climate-concerned parties, with another user suggesting Canada “should be conquered” because of the wildfires happening every year. (Unclear by whom they should be conquered, as the assumption would be the US, ignoring the fact the US also experiences annual wildfires.)
These responses are premised in climate disinformation narratives that presume countries are neglecting to manage forests and should be held accountable for the consequences of wildfires as well as providing the participatory disinformation in alignment with non-climate partisan attacks on Canadian sovereignty that President Trump has continued since, as part of the feedback loop of participatory disinformation.
This escalation in rhetoric, laundered as humor, normalizes violence on a society-wide scale, a harm of social media that’s been well–documented but hardly corrected by platform owners, although civil society groups are responding with criticisms of the Canadian government’s fast-tracking of fossil fuel expansion.
UK Wildfire Disinformation
There are three key narratives that have been used consistently over the last couple of years in the UK that track with the larger global online conversation.
The first tactic to downplay or dismiss the role of climate change in creating conditions suitable for fires by focusing entirely, and often falsely, on attributing the initial cause to arson or other types of human activity that start fires, besides burning fossil fuels. The second is the partisan polarization approach that accuses governments of prioritizing climate policies over other ways of reducing the risk of wildfires. This is often paired with the third, accusing climate scientists and media of exaggerating the climate dangers to scare people into accepting climate policies.
EU Shouldn’t NEED Air Conditioning.
As some American posters were fantasizing about dropping nuclear bombs on their northern neighbor because of the air pollution from wildfires floating south, as though the nuclear radiation wouldn’t follow the same trajectory, they were also stoking a similarly well-thought-through rhetorical war on Europe.
Their weapon of choice? Not posts about nuclear war, but instead, air conditioning. Because in the same way the answer to wildfire smoke is nuclear fallout, the answer to European heatwaves is apparently American-style air-conditioning, the widespread use of which worsens the climate crisis turning up the temps in the first place.
But for digital disinfluencers and climate deniers, air conditioning access is supposedly at risk due to European climate and energy policies.
Policies that, of course, are unnecessary in their book, as they sought narratives to deny how climate change is what’s making it so hot that the EU needs A/C in the first place, and turned to traditional science denial.
Deniers portrayed the event as ordinary weather, media-driven alarmism, or the result of natural atmospheric patterns rather than long-term climate trends and used the heatwave to challenge established climate science and argue that climate risks are routinely exaggerated for political purposes.
These narratives were often paired with criticism of renewable energy, with some actors claiming that high temperatures exposed the limitations of solar power and reinforced the need for fossil fuels during periods of extreme weather while in reality renewables are exactly what’s keeping the A/Cs running in the US.
Many partisan outlets gave limited attention to climate change during the heatwave, instead emphasizing lifestyle and (slightly risque) entertainment coverage centered on people enjoying the warm weather. While often lighthearted, this coverage helped frame the event as a seasonal novelty rather than a serious public health concern, reinforcing narratives that downplayed the severity of the heatwave.
These narratives allowed disinformation actors to capitalize on the air-conditioning debate and steer attention away from discussions of the role climate change plays in extreme heat.
2026 Iberian Heatwave Conversations
The most common disinformation narratives identified in Portuguese around the heatwave were accusations of “alarmism” and manufacturing doubt about the connection between the warm weather and global warming.
These narratives have been used repeatedly, with one channel, Ancapsu, publishing something similar to a video from three years ago.
Meanwhile in Spain, in addition to the usual denial and downplaying of the deaths and other health impacts of the heat wave, partisan polarization played out via criticisms that the Prime Minister posted some precautions about the heatwave instead of addressing the sentencing of a former Transport minister embroiled in a COVID-era corruption scandal.
Another more unique narrative identified was of deliberate weather manipulation, posts of what otherwise looks like a pleasant blue sky described as evidence of sinister geoengineering.
How much more evidence of harms do policymakers need to hold social media companies accountable?
For at least the past five years, researchers, fact-checkers and civil society organizations have documented the harms of social media products when it comes to extreme weather events and disinformation. Companies can no longer plead ignorance of the problem, or their ability to solve them, if they chose to.
At the start of the 2026 wildfire season, CAAD warned that the same “predictable” false narratives would return. They did. Conspiracy theories, political attacks, climate denial, and inflammatory rhetoric once again spread widely across social media as people searched for reliable information about the wildfires and heatwaves affecting their communities.
As climate change drives more frequent and more dangerous extreme weather, the consequences of this failure are growing. Scientific excuses, partisan attacks, and violent rhetoric are now what chokes the social media landscape as users search for reliable information on the wildfires and heatwaves they’re experiencing, consequences of climate change they won’t view as such if they instead are told repeatedly that it’s actually evidence of some bizarre conspiracy theory.
Without transparency, safety, and accountability measures in place, social media companies will continue to broadcast harmful false claims polluting the public’s understanding of critical events and drowning out their access to reliable, potentially life-saving information during times of extreme weather and other crises. The question is no longer whether action is justified, but how much longer they are willing to delay it.
Annex
Methods and Volume of Heatwave and Wildfire posts
To assemble a body of posts for “heatwave” content, we used the Brandwatch social media monitoring tool to search within our wider, ongoing climate disinformation data query– filtered by English-language and data range from May 19, 2026- July 3rd, 2026. This online discourse covers digital media, as well as social media platforms, though the tool is disproportionately capturing posts from the X platform.
The volume spikes occurred during the two heatwave peaks, with the 2nd wave in June with escalating social media engagement.
Figure 1: Overall volume of English-language conversations related to heatwaves in Europe. Source: BrandwatchVolume of Portuguese Heatwave disinformation
Portuguese-language online conversations around the heatwaves affecting Europe in 2026 showed peaks in conversation following the heatwaves in late May then June. Out of the top 100 posts identified, 29 contained climate denialist narratives, and they had a combined estimated reach of 4,758,626.
Figure 2: Original Portuguese-language mentions of heatwave-related keywords between 1 May and 5 July 2026, filtered by geography (Europe). Source: Brandwatch
Portuguese conversations that included keywords relating to “alarmism” and similar disinformation narratives:
Figure 3: Original Portuguese-language mentions of heatwave-related keywords accompanied by alarmism-related keywords between 1 May and 5 July 2026, filtered by geography (Europe). Source: Brandwatch
Spanish Language Heatwave Conversations
Figure 4: Spanish-language mention trends for the following general search: (“ola de calor” OR “calor extremo” OR “altas temperaturas”) AND (“red eléctrica” OR electricidad OR “demanda eléctrica” OR “consumo eléctrico” OR apagón OR renovables OR “energía renovable” OR solar OR fotovoltaica OR eólica OR almacenamiento OR baterías OR “cambio climático”). Source: Brandwatch
UK Wildfire Conversation Volume
We ran a general climate narrative search on Brandwatch, geotargeted to the United Kingdom, to get a baseline of conversation volume surrounding wildfires. This online discourse covers digital media, as well as social media platforms, though the tool is disproportionately capturing posts from the X platform. The chart below captures a steady stream of conversations, with spikes coinciding with major heatwaves that occurred in the nation, beginning in June 2025.
Figure 5: Overall volume of English-language conversations related to wildfires in the UK, 1 June 2025 – 30 June 2026. Source: Brandwatch
Our data range was intended to capture recent heatwaves in Europe as well as those in the US and the wildfire season as a whole, so this chart represents 1 May to 19 July 2026. The chart shows an obvious escalation beginning on 22 June, and again around 13 July. This coincides with the current heatwaves spreading across Europe and wildfires in the UK. Total mentions during this period sit around 10,000 (a ⅓ of volume from the last year) but currently spiking.
Figure 6: Overall volume of English-language conversations related to wildfires in the UK since May 2026. Source: Brandwatch
Arson/Human-Driven
Figure 7: Volume of English-language conversations with specific mentions of human-driven causes. Source: Brandwatc
Diverted Resources & Net Zero Goals
Figure 8: Volume of English-language conversations with specific mentions of net zero. Source: Brandwatch
2 This data set represents an ongoing, flexible, Boolean search query using the most dominant climate disinformation keywords. Currently: (climate OR climatechange OR climatecrisis OR “global warming” OR “global temperature”) AND (thunberg OR “extinction rebellion” OR extinctionrebellion OR “climate action network” OR climatehoax OR climatecult OR climategate OR climatescam OR “net zero” OR netzero OR (energy NEAR/5 (renewable OR solar OR clean OR wind OR turbine)) OR fossilgas OR lng OR “zero emissions” OR “carbon capture” OR agroecology) // (“fossil fuels” OR renewables) AND (“energy independence” OR “energy security”)
2 Brandwatch search terms: (“climate change” OR “global warming”) AND (“wildfires” OR “fires” OR “brush fire” OR “bushfire”)
3 Brandwatch search terms: ((“climate change” OR “global warming”) AND (“wildfires” OR “fires” OR “brush fire” OR “bushfire”)) AND (“arson” OR “human”)
4 Brandwatch search terms: ((“climate change” OR “global warming”) AND (“wildfires” OR “fires” OR “brush fire” OR “bushfire”)) AND (“net zero” OR “renewables” OR “green policies”)