Climate Change Drives Wildfire Conditions, But Algorithms Reward a Different Story

As wildfire season ramps up, a global coalition combating climate disinformation warns that climate “disinfluencers” are spreading falsehoods online, and that social media companies could do more to prevent them from disrupting access to critical information.

Disinfluencers promote conspiracy theories, including arson claims, to explain record wildfire seasons, deflecting from climate-driven conditions that make fires spread faster and burn more intensely, warns Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD).

CAAD, Friends of the Earth, and Roots tracked [pdf] the spread of disinformation in 2023—the year wildfires burned 185,000 square kilometres in Canada’s most destructive fire year on record. That same year, experts linked emissions from 88 fossil fuel and cement companies to nearly half of the increase in wildfire danger and drought conditions in parts of North America since 1901.

Climate change driven by fossil fuels has been substantially linked to fires becoming more destructive. Yet, CAAD watched wildfire disinformation spread digitally “across languages and hemispheres,” the group writes in a briefing. Its Spanish-language report traced narratives emerging after wildfires in Greece in 2018, then spreading from Chile and Spain, to Canada, to Hawai’i, and finally back to Spain, in a single year.

Technology giants are contributing to this proliferation, CAAD argues. “Big Tech has made digital disinformation worse by creating an attention economy that broadcasts lies no matter the cost.”

CAAD partnered with McGill and Carleton Universities in 2024 to assess the Canadian wildfire conversation. They found that conspiracy theories—about lasers, drones, weather control, eco-terrorism, and state-driven arson—circulated widely as people sought essential information including evacuation and support services.

“The chaos affected political leaders managing the crisis, firefighting, evacuation routes, media reporting, and, of course, people making hard decisions about their health and the safety of their communities.”

Posts in the same vein by right-wing influencer Alex Jones during the 2025 Los Angeles fires were viewed on X four times more than the most-viewed credible news source. It further dwarfed local emergency departments.

Disinfluencers accuse reporters of downplaying arson and inflating climate concerns, using this narrative to undermine climate policy, CAAD adds.

It also writes that Big Tech algorithms favour the high engagement these posts receive over credible sources. People are left sifting through a slew of misinformed influencers before finding real information. Making matters worse, X’s billionaire owner himself, Elon Musk, spreads disinformation on the platform.

“Social media users know that if they spread conspiracy theories about climate change, platforms might eventually reward them with attention, influence, and money, the same way a gambler ‘knows’ someone’s eventually going to hit the slot machine jackpot,” CAAD writes. “It’s just a matter of pulling the lever.”

Meanwhile, some political appointees have sought to cast doubt on attribution science, the field of research that examines the extent to which climate change influences the likelihood and severity of extreme weather events. Last year, the Trump administration replaced the scientists working on a new National Climate Assessment with a five-member “Climate Working Group,” CNN reported.

In an email released through litigation, one of these members wrote: “All I can hope is that what we write will provide sufficient ‘reasonable scientific doubt’ regarding the science claims.”

The resulting report downplayed the impacts of climate change. It was called deceptive, cherry-picked, and anti-scientific by climate scientists, and the process was later ruled unlawful by a U.S. judge.

Climate scientist Andrew Dressler, a professor of atmospheric sciences, writes in a Substack post that fossil fuel interests “are terrified” of attribution science. “They are acutely aware that this research could land them in court. And losing those cases would leave them legally liable for billions of dollars in climate damages.”

Dressler calls people like the members of the working group the “new merchants of doubt.”

CAAD has provided partial funding for The Energy Mix’s Hidden Wonder Valley investigative series.