Aunoo Intelligence · 20 July 2026
France went through its third major heatwave of the year in mid-July. Within days, a pro-Russian account was telling followers the heat might be the work of HAARP, a US ionospheric research programme in Alaska. Of course the claim has no scientific basis. The same conspiracy theory has circulated for years to reappear during the heatwave.
The French think tank IRIS, in a report covered this week by France24’s Observers team, says this is now a recurring tactic. State actors use extreme-weather events to push disinformation at European audiences. The report, “Climate Disinformation and Information Warfare,” was produced by an IRIS observatory that works for the French armed forces ministry. It names Russia and the United States as the main actors, with China in a smaller defensive role.
Information warfare fastens onto issues that already divide a society, and climate is now one of them in Europe. The lead researcher, Mathilde Jourde, calls a disaster a “blessing” for this work. Fear is high and official information is thin, so false claims spread quickly and cheaply. The standing target behind the individual events is European climate and energy policy, above all the European Green Deal. Russia and the United States both export fossil fuels and both stand to gain if the EU slows its decarbonisation.
On the Russian side, IRIS points to Portal Kombat, a network that France’s counter-interference agency Viginum exposed in February 2024. Viginum counted around 193 automated portals that republish and amplify pro-Russian material rather than producing their own, running on infrastructure linked to a Crimea-based company and spreading across EU member states after they were named. IRIS cites the 2024 Valencia floods in Spain, which killed more than 200 people, as a case where Russian sources amplified false emergency numbers and inflated death tolls while the disaster was still unfolding.
On the American side, IRIS points to think tanks aligned with the administration, chiefly the Heartland Institute, which rejects the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change and opened a UK/Europe office in London in December 2024 to campaign against European climate policy. IRIS goes further and classes the administration’s own official climate communications as disinformation, citing what it calls fabricated figures in a Department of Energy climate report and the removal of terms such as “climate change” from federal websites.
Viginum, a French government service, verified Portal Kombat, and Heartland’s European expansion is on the public record. The timing pattern holds across the cases IRIS examined. Disinformation spiked in the hours after the 2023 Maui wildfires, the 2024 Valencia floods, and this month’s European heatwaves, when official information was scarce and fear was high.
IRIS assesses that the disinformation serves a larger goal, weakening European unity over Ukraine and slowing EU climate policy, and that the actors behind it treat each new disaster as an opening.
Extreme-weather events are becoming more frequent, so these sort of narrative attacks will keep recurring. The hours right after a disaster are the most exposed, because that is when authorities are most overstretched and reliable official information is hardest to find.
Read our full Situation Report: https://github.com/AuNooAI/situationreports/blob/main/reports/2026-07-state-climate-disinformation-europe/sitrep.md
Sources: FRANCE 24, “How state actors are exploiting climate crises to spread disinformation” (20 July 2026); IRIS / Observatoire Défense et Climat, “Climate Disinformation and Information Warfare”; the French Foreign Ministry and Viginum on the Portal Kombat network (February 2024); E&E News on the Heartland Institute’s European branch. The full Aunoo situation report is in the Aunoo Intelligence situation-reports repository.
