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Fires and Falsehoods in California
Security actors around the world are beginning to recognize the risks posed by information manipulation surrounding extreme weather, climate resilience, and the clean energy transition. The overlapping interests in the physical carbon economy and the digital attention economy provide fertile ground for opportunistic extremists and authoritarian states to scapegoat adversaries, undermine democratic legitimacy, and warp policymaking processes.
California is a prime example of where these dynamics will continue to play out as climate change impacts worsen, geopolitics fragments, and information ecosystems are transformed. California plays an outsized economic role both in the United States and globally. The state produces three-quarters of the country’s fruits and nuts, is home to a significant portion of global tech infrastructure and Fortune 500 companies, and ranks number one in the country for tourism spending. California’s GDP would rank fourth globally, just ahead of Japan, if it were an independent nation. California hosts the largest military population of any US state, houses infrastructure for detecting or countering missile attacks on the United States, and would be a critical US staging ground in the event of conflict over Taiwan or North Korea.
It is also highly vulnerable to climate change impacts and extreme weather, most notably wildfires and drought. These economic, environmental, and security factors result in a state that is susceptible to the kind of mis- and disinformation that undermines climate action, sows seeds of social division, endangers citizens during disasters, and undermines national security. These threats can come from a mix of actors and motives, including opportunistic political leaders, foreign actors conducting hybrid warfare, domestic extremists undermining social cohesion, outrage merchants monetizing attention, and well-meaning people caught up in algorithmic echo-chambers.
(more…)Watch: CCS Expert Webinar Explores Extreme Weather and Disinformation
By Tom Ellison
Information manipulation by authoritarian states, extremist movements, and private interests is increasingly contributing to and capitalizing on extreme weather, undermining security and democratic discourse.
That was one key message from a recent webinar from the Center for Climate and Security (CCS), which brought together national security, climate, and information experts for a discussion available to watch here. Deputy Director Tom Ellison gave an overview of CCS’s work on climate security, information manipulation, and democratic governance, with support from the John and James L. Knight Foundation. This work aims to close gaps at the collision of security, climate, and information issues, including analysis of how actors like Russia amplify climate disinformation to weaken democratic rivals, and exercises on how US states and cities can reckon with intensifying climate, security, and information challenges.
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Exploring the Collision of Extreme Weather, Information Manipulation, and Security Threats in Florida
By Tom Ellison, Erin Sikorsky, and Noah Fritzhand
Information manipulation is increasingly recognized as a contributor to climate risks. 2025 saw landmark academic assessments on the topic, as well as the first action on climate information integrity at a UN climate summit. Meanwhile, bad actors take advantage of opportunities to propagandize, sow confusion, and undermine trust as the impacts of climate change intensify and the stakes of policy action grow. These mutually reinforcing challenges jeopardize security and democracy, especially amid volatile geopolitics, rapid change in the technology and media landscape, and US federal reversals on climate policy and information integrity.
This raises questions for a range of US actors amid intensifying extreme weather. How can state and local officials build resilience and respond to emergencies when facing an unsupportive federal government and global, minimally regulated information threats? What are the implications for US military disaster relief and readiness when information manipulation threatens political cohesion and civilian communities? How can journalism or tech policy serve climate security by mitigating mis/disinformation? And how can academia, civil society, and community groups better collaborate to exchange information and expertise?
The Center for Climate and Security (CCS) recently completed a foresight exercise in Florida to explore these questions. Co-hosted by the University of Miami’s Climate Resilience Institute, the event brought together a diverse mix of expertise, including local resilience and emergency management, national security and foreign policy, communications and information integrity, social and natural sciences, and local climate education and activism. Participants heard from senior homeland security and defense speakers, then engaged in a facilitated scenario exercise exploring a plausible extreme weather, information, and national security crisis in Florida. The discussion highlighted several key themes.
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New CCS Briefers on Climate Misinformation and Geoengineering
By Tom Ellison and Erin Sikorsky
Today CCS released two new briefers on critical and related topics in climate security: mis- and disinformation, and geoengineering.
The first, “Climate Security and Misinformation: A Baseline” offers a framework and overview on how intensifying climate change and policy responses create openings for bad actors to spread mis- and disinformation. These challenges extend beyond climate denialism and intersect with the breadth of direct and indirect climate security risks, ranging from the scapegoating of climate disasters on adversaries, to incitement against climate migrants and protesters, to misleading obstruction of the energy transition, to state efforts to stoke climate- and energy-related divisions in their adversaries. Amid rapidly evolving digital technology and low trust, addressing these challenges means closing knowledge gaps, designing climate policies with disinformation pitfalls in mind, and more aggressively countering climate mis- and disinformation, akin to election interference or vaccine denial.
Meanwhile, “Geoengineering and Climate Change in an Age of Disinformation and Strategic Competition” dives deep into the debate about the risks and benefits of exploring geoengineering, particularly solar radiation management, a nascent climate intervention technique that would aim to artificially dim the sun and ameliorate global warming. A steady drumbeat of reports from governments and scientific institutions argue for developing research programs to allow for better informed decisions on the risks and benefits of geoengineering. At the same time, the national security community is raising concerns emphasizing the risk of large-scale, successful unilateral deployment by a middle or rogue power. However, the more acute, near-term security risks associated with geoengineering have little to do with the ultimate effect of such interventions, but instead with the perceptions of such interventions or even research and testing of such technologies, particularly in a world shaped by geopolitical competition, growing divides between the Global North and Global South, and dis/misinformation.