When conspiracy theories and climate disasters collide

It was supposed to work the other way around: Intensifying storms would jolt us awake, intensifying efforts to tackle climate change. But our capacity for intensifying existing beliefs may turn out to be more destructive than the storms themselves.

Have you ever seen a weathercaster break down on TV before this week? On Monday, John Morales, one of Florida’s longest serving meteorologists choked up live on air. No stranger to hurricanes after 40 years in the business, Morales had just received a bulletin about Hurricane Milton from the National Hurricane Center when the news anchors turned to him for an update.

“It’s just an incredible, incredible, incredible hurricane,” Morales stammered, closing his eyes. “It has dropped…” Voice breaking, eyes tearing, Morales had to stop speaking. And then, with fear choking his voice, he blurted: “It has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours.” Later, gathering his wits: “I apologize — this is just horrific.”

Clips of the newscast went viral and Morales eventually reposted it himself, after hearing from viewers that his raw reaction had made them take the hurricane more seriously than any government warning ever could. It might be the first instance of millibar virality on social media. 

It was the degree of “rapid intensification” that had frightened the hurricane veteran. The morning before, Morales was keeping an eye on a “mundane” tropical storm, he later explained. By noon the next day, it had exploded into a Category 5 hurricane with sustained winds above 250 km/h.

We’ll have to add “rapid intensification” to our layperson lexicon, along with heat domes and atmospheric rivers. Meteorologists have a couple of categories. “Rapid intensification” is when wind speeds pick up by 56 km/h in the span of 24 hours. They’ve had to add a category of “extreme rapid intensification” when winds accelerate over 93 km/h within a day. Milton intensified almost 150 km/h in the 24 hours leading up to the on-air breakdown.

“So you’ve got normal intensification, then you have rapid intensification, then you have extreme rapid intensification,” Morales says. “And then you have Milton. That’s what really makes (it) so astounding.”

Barely one week earlier, Morales had written an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists about Hurricane Helene. He described how hotter oceans intensify cyclones. The Gulf of Mexico was record hot and climate change had made those temperatures 600 times more likely, he underscored. The article was titled “Hurricane Helene isn’t an outlier. It’s a harbinger of the future.”

That future was just days away. But the intensification of back-to-back hurricanes doesn’t appear to be a harbinger of a new climate politics. Instead, after so many years of being told climate change is a hoax, or exaggerated by zealots, a disturbing number of people are reaching for meaning in any direction that doesn’t challenge those priors. Conspiracy theories are intensifying as quickly as the storms, and spreading much more broadly. 

Even as he toured areas ravaged by Milton’s many tornadoes, Governor Ron DeSantis made a point of denying any impact of global warming, looping climate change into the culture wars and lashing out at those who think “it’s all because of fossil fuels.”

Florida is highly vulnerable to climate change — famous, after all, for beaches, everglades, and the low-lying Florida Keys. The insurance industry is teetering with firms pulling out entirely. But DeSantis describes himself as “not a global warming person,” which is putting it mildly. His drive against climate action in Florida has accelerated recently. Not only has he blocked cities from restricting the use of natural gas, he pushed tax breaks to incentivize gas stoves. In May, DeSantis signed a law known informally as the “don’t say climate change” law, deleting the words and removing consideration of climate change from state statutes. For good measure, it also axed the state’s goals for renewable energy, banned offshore wind turbines, repealed state programs for energy conservation, and removed purchase standards for fuel-efficient vehicles. 

“The legislation I signed today… will keep windmills off our beaches, gas in our tanks, and China out of our state,” DeSantis posted at the time. “We’re restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots.”

Following Helene and Milton, the MAGA-verse is a boiling cauldron of incoherence: that humans can’t change the climate but storms are being manipulated by the government; that citizens are being denied support because of immigrants and Ukraine; and that climate change is a pretext for authoritarianism — disaster agencies are described alternately as pitifully inept and powerful enough to confiscate land and seize towns.

Before the floodwaters had subsided from Helene, Donald Trump began claiming that Republican counties were being denied assistance from the feds. As Milton bore down, he declared that “the Harris-Biden administration… stole the FEMA money (Federal Emergency Management Agency) so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them.”

Immigrants are eating your pets and your disaster funds, in Trump’s telling. And the Murdoch media was eager to join in:

Meanwhile, the hard-right in Congress is pushing the notion that climate change is a pretext for authoritarian government. It’s the “new COVID,” says Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

One of the key amplifiers of hurricane disinformation is Trump’s awkwardest cheerleader. Elon Musk is “probably the biggest amplifier of disinformation, retweeting things that are clearly false,” says Juliette Kayyem, author of The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters. Musk called FEMA’s disaster response “treason,” promoted claims the feds were confiscating relief supplies and supported calls for Kamala Harris and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to “be jailed for life for spending FEMA money on illegal aliens and not Americans.” 

Meteorologists are getting death threats. The Red Cross and disaster response agencies are having to put staff onto combatting the flood of online derangement, setting up webpages like FEMA’s Rumor Response Page. 

It’s all much too much for some elected officials. A few Republicans at the national level have begun speaking out about the disinformation spread by members of their own party. And Republican State Senator Kevin Corbin of North Carolina took to Facebook pleading for an end to right-wing conspiracy theories. “Please help stop this junk,” he posted, giving a sampling of the kind of conspiracies swamping relief efforts:

“Example: FEMA is stealing money from donations, body bags ordered but government has denied, bodies not being buried, government is controlling the weather from Antarctica, government is trying to get lithium from (North Carolina), stacks of bodies left at hospitals, and on and on and on.”  

Conspiracy theories after disasters are not new, of course, but they have surged to record levels following Helene and Milton. “It is absolutely the worst I have ever seen,” says FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell. According to an analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, “Falsehoods around hurricane response have spawned credible threats and incitement to violence directed at the federal government.” 

The fear mongering is tapping ancient hatreds. The ISD report looked at posts on X and found “overt antisemitic hate” in 30 per cent of the posts it reviewed, “including abuse directed at public officials such as the Mayor of Asheville, North Carolina; the FEMA Director of Public Affairs; and the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.” The institute could only analyze a sample of the online torrent, but the anti-semitic posts had racked up 17.1 million views by Oct. 7 — before Hurricane Milton had even made landfall in Florida.

To call this a problem of misinformation or disinformation is far too tepid. And the notion that firestorms or back-to-back hurricanes might whip up a broad consensus for “climate action” seems increasingly obtuse. Across large segments of the population, much darker forces are being churned up by the overheated world.