Weaponising the weather: climate disinformation in Europe

by Ana Romero-Vicente, EU DisinfoLab.

The HEAT: Harmful Environmental Agendas & Tactics investigation, run by Logically and EU DisinfoLab with support from EMIF, offers an unprecedented look at how climate disinformation spreads across Europe, with a focus on Germany, France, and the Netherlands.

HEAT reveals how climate issues are being weaponised within broader disinformation ecosystems. Across countries, ideologically driven campaigns are undermining public trust in climate action and stalling the green transition by turning climate into a polarising wedge issue.

The findings are clear: climate disinformation is eroding public trust and democratic resilience. HEAT calls on platforms, policymakers, and media literacy actors to respond.

Our approach

Spanning a period from October 2024 to June 2025, HEAT focused on four categories of climate disinformation, termed the Four Pillars:

1. Conspiracy milieu – narratives involving HAARP, chemtrails, and geoengineering[P1] .
2. Culture war & partisan discourse – framing climate action as elitist, authoritarian, or disconnected from ordinary lives.
3. Hostile State actors – disinformation amplified by foreign media, notably Russia-linked outlets such as Pravda and RT.
4. Big oil-aligned campaigns – narratives aligned with fossil fuel interests.

We tracked how these narrative frames circulated and evolved across platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Telegram, and fringe blogs, while identifying key actors and patterns of amplification.

What we found

Narratives:

Across Germany, France, and the Netherlands, HEAT found that climate misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (MDM) narratives evolved from denialism to more complex claims, centred on elite control, conspiracy theories, and populist backlash. While shaped by local political and media contexts, these narratives shared common tactics of amplification and emotional framing. The overarching strategy remained the same:  Erode democratic resilience by turning climate policy into a polarising, conspiratorial wedge issue.

Country snapshots

• In Germany, disinformation spiked during the debate over the Heizungsgesetz (“Building Energy Act”, which mandates phasing out old, inefficient heating systems). Narratives framed the Green Party as authoritarian and equated climate policy with social control. Fringe theories about weather manipulation (HAARP, chemtrails) were rampant on Telegram, while Facebook lent a pseudo-academic tone via actors like EIKE[P2] . Russia-linked actors like RT.de amplified these messages by duplicating content across lookalike websites (mirrored domains) and using identical blocks of text (copypasta) to saturate social media feeds and evade moderation.
• In France, narratives merged climate disinformation with with anti-elite sentiment and libertarian rhetoric. Telegram channels and Facebook pages depicted Zones à Faibles Émissions (Low Emission Zones) as a tool to limit working-class freedom while right-wing media like Sud Radio amplified the term escrologistes[P3]  (“eco-crooks”). Russian-linked networks like Pravda Français served as strategic multipliers of these messages.
• In the Netherlands, agricultural populism featured prominently, especially in response to nitrogen caps and climate-related farming restrictions. Influencers, Telegram channels, fringe news blogs, far-right political actors, and grassroots protest networks used hashtags like #klimaatdictatuur (“climate dictatorship”) and promoted fringe narratives about HAARP and Bovaer (a methane-reducing feed additive), which generated high levels of engagement and visibility on social media, particularly among audiences already mobilised during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Disinformation actors are actively exploiting socio-political conditions to entrench their climate-related messaging. Unpacking these grievances is key to understanding why it resonates so far beyond extremist echo chambers.” HEAT Analyst Team

Cross-platform migration & amplification

While a common pattern emerged, Telegram as an incubator, Facebook for legitimacy, X for virality, each platform played a distinct role, and narratives varied by country, actor, and audience.

• Telegram often incubates long-form conspiracies
• Facebook provided ideological reinforcement via pseudo-academic sources
• X enabled virality and hashtag hijacking
• Fringe blogs and alternative pages served as incubators for conspiracy-laden narratives and ideological radicalisation

We were surprised by how seamlessly fringe climate conspiracies flowed between countries and actor types—what began in fringe conspiracy spaces often migrated into partisan discourse and even mainstream political narratives.” HEAT Analyst team.

Why it matters

Climate disinformation weaponises emotion and identity, eroding trust in institutions and polarising society. It undermines evidence-based policymaking and invites foreign interference. Yet EU regulation is falling short.

The HEAT investigation shows that climate disinformation is strategic, adaptive, and structurally harmful. It does so by:

• Reframing climate as a culture war issue[P4] 
• Undermining trust in science[P5] 
• Enabling foreign interference[P6] 
• Exploiting platform algorithms[P7] 

The regulatory gap and platforms failures

The Digital Services Act (DSA) requires Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) like Facebook and X to assess systemic risks, but climate disinformation isn’t officially recognised, letting platforms sidestep moderation and reporting duties.

Telegram, despite playing a central role in hosting conspiracies, is not designated as a VLOP. With weak moderation, opaque operations, and encrypted reach, it remains a major regulatory blind spot.

What needs to happen:

• The EU must classify climate disinformation as a systemic risk under the DSA.
• Platforms like Facebook and X must act on high-reach climate falsehoods.
• National regulators should step up oversight of Telegram and similar fringe platforms.

« Treat climate disinformation like a systemic threat, because it is. Without that recognition in the DSA, platforms won’t act, and trust will keep eroding.» HEAT Policy team.

Call to action

1. Educate audiences on disinformation tactics. Media literacy actors can use real examples from HEAT to expose and explain how these tactics work:
   • Emotional manipulation: Claims about “climate lockdowns” or threats to personal freedoms, using fear-based language to generate outrage.
   • Conspiratorial framing: Narratives linked climate policies to weather manipulation programmes like HAARP or “chemtrails”, falsely suggesting elite control.
   • Ideological triggers: Green policies like net-zero are framed as threats to national identity, the rural economy, or working-class livelihoods.
2. Promote credible sources. To counter disinformation, media literacy actors should guide the public toward trustworthy sources such as climate scientists, fact-checkers, and civil society organisations. HEAT’s findings help structure this effort by identifying four major types of climate disinformation

Elevate critical thinking. The HEAT project shows how disinformation travels, where it starts, how it morphs, and where it lands. Teaching citizens to understand these patterns helps them to spot manipulation and halt its spread.

 [P1] HAARP (High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) is a U.S.-based research project that studies the ionosphere using high-frequency radio waves, but conspiracy theories falsely claim it manipulates weather and causes natural disasters. / Chemtrails are part of a debunked conspiracy theory claiming that airplane condensation trails contain harmful chemicals deliberately sprayed for population control or weather manipulation, despite no scientific evidence. / Geoengineering: often misrepresented in conspiracy theories as covert climate control.

 [P2] EIKE (European Institute for Climate and Energy) is a German climate-sceptic organisation that promotes pseudo-scientific arguments against climate action and is frequently cited by disinformation actors.

 [P3]The term escrologistes is a French play on words that combines “écologistes” (environmentalists) with “escrocs” (scammers or frauds). It is used pejoratively to discredit climate advocates by portraying them as corrupt, hypocritical, or manipulative, and features prominently in right-wing and climate-sceptic discourse in France.

 [P4] Rather than debate climate policy on scientific or economic grounds, disinformation actors reduce it to identity-based conflict “us vs them”, left vs right, or people vs elites, which polarises public opinion and undermines consensus.

 [P5] Fringe voices and pseudo-experts promote misleading claims under the guise of scientific critique, eroding the credibility of legitimate research and democratic institutions.

 [P6] Russia-linked outlets strategically amplify climate disinformation by mirroring local grievances, seeding identical content across platforms, and injecting it into national debates to weakening EU cohesion from within.

 [P7] Emotionally charged content, outrage, fear, victimhood, is favoured by algorithms, making conspiracy and pseudo-scientific narratives more likely to be seen, shared, and believed. This amplifies disinformation among audiences that feel disenfranchised, such as rural communities, low-trust users, and politicised protest groups.