When a hurricane tears through a coastal town or a flood swallows an entire neighborhood, the first thing many of us do is reach for our phones. We check on loved ones, we scroll for updates, we look for answers. But in that frantic blur of fear and uncertainty, we are also especially vulnerable to stories that tell us what to think and who to blame. A study published in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, titled Amplifying the Storm, looks closely at this exact vulnerability. The researchers wanted to understand how right-wing extremist Telegram channels use natural disasters as openings to spread climate disinformation. It’s easy to imagine that a disaster would slow down political warfare, that people would set aside their differences and come together. The study shows the opposite. For some networks, a storm is less a tragedy than an opportunity. The chaos becomes fuel. The suffering becomes proof of a broken system. And the fragile, emotional space where ordinary people are looking for safety becomes a recruiting ground for anger. The title says it all: these groups are not just reacting to the storm. They are amplifying it—twisting the fear, the images, the personal losses, and the confusion into a political weapon aimed at climate science, governments, and the idea that we can address the crisis together.
What makes this study so important is that it doesn’t just count how many lies were spread. It digs into the mechanics of how disinformation actually works in real time. The researchers looked at Telegram channels connected to right-wing extremist movements, places where climate denial has become part of a broader anti-establishment worldview. They focused on what happened before, during, and after major weather events. They tracked the language, the tone, the volume of posts, and the kinds of claims being shared. The result is a detailed portrait of a coordinated ecosystem that treats disasters as teachable moments—not to teach the public about resilience or evacuation, but to teach them that climate change is a hoax and that anyone who talks about it is trying to control them. The study doesn’t dismiss these posters as random trolls. It treats them as strategic communicators, and that’s a crucial distinction. They know exactly what they’re doing. They understand that a burning landscape or a flooded street carries more emotional weight than any chart or policy document. They use that emotional weight deliberately. The goal isn’t just to deny climate science, though that’s part of it. The deeper goal is to destroy trust in institutions, in scientists, in journalists, and in the idea that human beings can solve a global problem through cooperation.
One of the most striking findings is that disasters don’t make these channels quieter. They make them louder. In the hours and days surrounding a climate-related disaster, the posting rate spikes dramatically across these extremist networks. The researchers describe this as a dynamic form of disinformation—not static, not passive, but intensely reactive. When a region is drowning, these channels flood their own feeds with content. They share dramatic images, often stripped of context, and layer them with narratives that blame everything except the climate. Sometimes the story is that the government deliberately let it happen. Sometimes it’s that solar panels or wind turbines caused the power outages. Sometimes it’s that the storm itself was manufactured by weather modification technology. These claims may contradict each other, but that doesn’t matter as much as the emotional payoff: the chance to say, “They are lying to you, and you are the one paying the price.” In this way, the channels exploit a very human tendency to look for meaning in disaster. When people feel helpless, conspiracy narratives offer a shame-free explanation. They turn vulnerable people into heroes of their own story, people who can see the truth that the mainstream wants to hide. The study shows how that appeal is crafted almost in real time, adapting to whatever images and footage are circulating, bending the facts to fit a preexisting story of betrayal and resistance.
The emotional core of these efforts is anger. But it’s not just raw anger—it’s organized anger. The researchers found that the rhetoric tends to follow a pattern. First, the disaster is amplified visually and emotionally, with posts that focus on destruction, death, displacement, and government failure. Then, the narrative shifts to blame. The real culprit, the posts say, isn’t a changing climate. It’s incompetent leaders, greedy elites, or a global conspiracy that wants to use the crisis to impose green policies on ordinary people. Climate scientists are mocked and demonized. Environmental groups are recast as enemies of progress. Terms like “climate alarmism” are used over and over, not as a description but as a weapon. The study notes that this isn’t merely denial in the traditional sense. It’s something more sophisticated: a complete counter-story about how the world works. In that story, institutions are liars, scientists are puppets, and disasters are opportunities to wake people up. This is what makes it disinformation rather than simple misunderstanding. The people spreading these narratives know that the claim about a hoax is false, or at least they’re indifferent to its truth. What they care about is impact. They want to recruit people who feel left behind. They want to harden the beliefs of people already inside the channel. And they want to push the broader conversation away from climate action and toward fear, division, and reactionary politics.
Another important layer of the study is the way Telegram connects to the wider internet. Telegram itself is not the most mainstream platform, but it functions like a command post. Content produced there is quickly captured, screenshotted, and shared across Instagram, TikTok, X, Facebook, and YouTube. Followers do the distribution work for free, spreading the messages into communities that may not even realize they are consuming extremist propaganda. The researchers describe this as an amplification loop. A dramatic weather event produces powerful images. Those images get picked up by extremist channels and framed with climate denial messages. Followers share the content, often adding their own comments. Then influencers and even some politicians amplify the messages further. By the time fact-checkers catch up, the posts have already traveled across platforms and time zones. The study argues that this speed and emotional weight make climate disinformation especially dangerous during disasters because it feeds on the exact moments when people are most anxious and least able to verify information. It also creates a kind of laughter through pain. Some of the posts mock climate activists while communities are still recovering. Some treat destruction as proof of hypocrisy. The tone is cold, cynical, and detached—but it works because it offers people a sense of superiority in the middle of helplessness. To feel that you are one of the few who knows the truth can be a powerful comfort, especially when everything around you is falling apart.
So what do we do with all this? The study doesn’t offer simple answers, but it points toward some important lessons. First, fact-checking alone is not enough. By the time a claim is debunked, the emotional connection has already been made, and the mistrust has already been planted. Disaster communication needs to be designed with disinformation in mind. Emergency agencies need to talk not just about evacuation routes and flood maps, but about the false narratives that will inevitably circulate during a storm. They need to preempt the lies, not chase after them. Community leaders, teachers, and local journalists also have a role to play in building trust before the next disaster hits, so that people have credible sources to turn to in the chaos. For the rest of us, the study is a reminder that conspiracies are rarely just about misinformation. They are about meaning. When people feel ignored, anxious, powerless, or disconnected, a story that gives them a villain and a mission can be intoxicating. The antidote to that is not only truth. It’s belonging. It’s being part of a community that cares about you and actually helps you make sense of the world. The storm may be natural, but the disinformation that follows it is made by people. We can’t stop hurricanes yet, but we can learn to recognize when someone is trying to turn a tragedy into a weapon. That awareness is itself a form of preparation. When the next storm comes, we don’t have to simply be people scrolling through a feed, looking for answers. We can be people who understand what we’re seeing, who refuse to let our fear be used against us, and who reach out to each other with something more powerful than a conspiracy: compassion.