From AI to greenlash: How is climate disinformation evolving?
Experts say climate disinformation is evolving to increasingly focus on picking apart green policies. In the background, over developments include a surge in AI-generated content of natural disasters.
From debunking claims that cold winters do not act as proof that global warming is fake to allegations that the climate changes naturally and so mankind is not to blame, scientists have spent decades proving the very existence of the climate crisis.
Yet experts say these disinformation narratives are increasingly evolving and that they are now moving towards discrediting environmental policies and climate action, rather than an outright denial of global warming.
"The era of climate denial is pretty much over," Ned Mendez, head of research and insights at digital campaigning agency 411, told Euronews' verification team, The Cube. "The disinformation industry has moved one rung downstream. So it's not really about whether the fight about global warming is real, it's about whether or not the response is feasible, whether it's fair and whether it is worth the price."
"When we think of disinformation, we tend to think of it as denying the existence of climate change or its human origins. What we're seeing, however, is that this isn’t necessarily the most common form the phenomenon takes today", Eva Morel, secretary of the French climate disinformation watchdog Quota Climat told us.
This fits into a wider political context of "greenlash", a portmanteau of "green" and "backlash" which describes the growing political resistance to climate change.
Despite this, climate disinformation remains strongly influenced by the news cycle, said Morel, as it is shaped by political debate, the publication of climate-related policy documents, major international events such as COPs or European summits, as well as major events such as heatwaves, floods, and wildfires.
These narratives are not confined to social media. While there's a consensus among European leaders that climate change is real and that it must be addressed, climate denial remains a part of the political landscape.
For example, in Germany, the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has questioned the scientific consensus that climate change is human-caused. Others, meanwhile, echo the statements of US President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly framed climate change as a "con job" and attacked European governments for their climate action policies, labelling such measures the "green new scam."
Heatwaves drive surge in misinformation
Nevertheless, false claims about the nature of climate change continue to surface hand in hand with misinformation about climate policies.
In June, Europe's record-breaking heatwave prompted a surge in misinformation, including viral social media posts alleging that high temperatures were not unusual. They claimed that they instead aligned with previous temperature spikes, citing heatwaves that occurred in London during the 1970s.
Climate scientists say that these claims are not only misleading but have also increased the amount of hostility and harassment they face, with many online blaming them for failed climate action.
"People argue that, ultimately, they [climate scientists] have been too alarmist, not educational enough, that they have pointed towards the wrong solutions and made the wrong decisions, and that it is therefore their fault," Morel said. "So the blame is placed on the experts."
False narratives about Europe's latest heatwave are not isolated. When a year's worth of precipitation hit eastern Spain in October 2024, disinformation about one of the deadliest natural disasters in the country's history, which took more than 230 lives, gained serious traction.
The false claims included allegations that dams were intentionally removed to intensify the floods, as well as allegations that the EU's biodiversity strategy and river restoration policy caused the disaster.
Politicians from Spain's far-right political party Vox, which contests the reality of climate change, were among the actors responsible for propagating these claims.
Deep institutional mistrust propped up these narratives, according to Mendez. "If you're primed to distrust an institution, even if they give you quite useful climate advice, for example, that water levels will be high at 4pm, you may think well, they're making it up to make a point."
Disinformation pillars
There are multiple recurring narratives when it comes to climate disinformation, including the idea that the green transition is a "punitive plan", imposed by a remote Brussels elite.
The green transition refers to a massive global shift away from highly polluting industries and fossil fuels toward sustainable, eco-friendly practices to fight climate change.
The negative discourse about it regularly flares up in response to green legislation, hiding behind the idea of "a legitimate policy debate about competitiveness and red tape", said Mendez.
"This links to accusations of private jet owning hypocrites lecturing you about your car and the turbine as a class that doesn't really share your life," he said. "And this isn't really factual, but it does ride a lot of other culture war stories."
Another online narrative works to spin public opinion against renewable energy solutions — such as wind and solar power — in order to present them as a "foreign intrusion" that prevents "climate sovereignty". This was the case during the Iberian Peninsula blackout in spring 2025, which saw a major power blackout in mainland Portugal and peninsular Spain.
The incident prompted a wave of criticism toward renewable energy: with widespread theories following the blackout arguing that Spain's reliance on solar and wind destabilised the grid and triggered the outage
However, this was quickly questioned by critics. A final report by ENTSO-E, the European network of transmission system operators, concluded that the blackout had multiple causes, among them, voltage control failures and grid oscillations. Renewable energy was not the final cause of the blackout.
"We saw that renewable energy was very quickly blamed, for instance, in local Facebook groups," Mendez told us. "It was going to WhatsApp communities within a day, and fabricated technical explanations were being laundered through kind of pseudo-experts."
However, there are also deeper roots to this scepticism around renewables, according to experts, with anxiety around energy security spiking since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
"We see these narratives a lot in central and eastern Europe, where coal or nuclear energy carries a kind of national identity," Mendez said. "Also, within rural communities that are facing specific projects."
He added that this fits into a broader context of economic uncertainty across Europe being spun to turn people against climate change measures, with detractors claiming that net zero will destroy jobs, drive up bills and harm traditional industries.
"And this doesn't need any ideology at all, it just needs a heating bill," he said.
'Lies are fun and engaging'
Despite the fact that the channels through which climate disinformation spreads have evolved, a large part of the messaging has remained constant over the decades.
"The biggest source of climate disinformation would be the advertising that Big Carbon spends big money on, be it sponsoring sports or cultural events, or TV, radio, newspaper and digital ads," said Philip Newell, communications co-chair at the coalition Climate Action Against Disinformation. "The industry is spending huge amounts of money, and reaching most people one way or another, so that’s the biggest by most metrics."
The monetisation of social media, which fuels the attention economy, also acts as an incentive for climate disinformation.
"What they've realised is that lies are fun and engaging," Newell said. "And so those sorts of conspiracy theories, the ABC of climate disinfo … have become sort of a viral meme every time."
He added that these "disinfluencers" are reliant on the attention economy to make their money, so they have an incentive to post every day and be part of the wider conversation to generate engagement, no matter the subject.
The role of AI in climate misinformation
AI is a constant source of misinformation these days, particularly when it comes to digitally generated images, and researchers say the tool has also led a broader range of people to spread false narratives about the climate.
"The stuff that used to be done was the remit of state actors with a vast budget," said Mendez. "Now you can do something on your own phone."
Inexpensive tools, helped by generative AI, allow social media users to generate convincing climate-related content and spread it quickly through local Facebook groups, TikTok and other social media platforms.
"Media coverage and, more broadly, the information environment surrounding the May and June 2026 heatwave showed that a new narrative was emerging," Morel said.
"It builds on existing narratives, such as denying the effectiveness of certain climate solutions or promoting air conditioning as a miracle solution to global warming, while introducing a new narrative that blames climatologists and environmental advocates themselves."
For example, a resident angry about a proposed wind farm could now use generative AI to create a convincing fake video claiming turbines had caught fire or collapsed, before sharing it in a local Facebook group.
This was seen in 2025, when climate change deniers pushed what they claimed was a scientific paper that disproved human-caused climate change.
It emerged that it was actually generated by xAI's chatbot Grok, and fact-checkers found the paper contained numerous factual errors and misinterpreted climate science.
