Photograph by Leonardo Caporali / Pexels
words by jake hall
Conspiracy theorists have always existed. People have invented grandiose tales of secret cults and imminent apocalypse; they’ve staged moon landings and phony assassinations. Throughout history, we’ve banished these unbelievable tales to the margins of society, making jokes about foil hats and flat-earthers. That’s no longer the case.
Earlier this year, the United States Environmental Protection Agency launched a website dedicated to debunking chemtrails, one of the internet’s most enduring conspiracy theories. The science is straightforward: Airplanes leave contrails, or condensation trails, in their wake. Conspiracy theorists, however, assert these streaks are poisonous chemicals sprayed into the atmosphere by powerful elites for mass sterilization and weather control. The EPA site lays out the basic science before addressing the rumors that prompted its creation. Yes, airplanes do sometimes spray chemicals for “non-nefarious purposes like firefighting or farming,” the text explains; but no, “the federal government is not aware of there ever being a contrail intentionally formed over the United States for the purpose of geoengineering or weather modification.”
The EPA’s move is striking given that President Donald Trump, a prolific promoter of conspiracy theories, helped push these ideas into the mainstream. (There’s a long Wikipedia page cataloging them.) The pandemic only deepened that shift. As COVID-19 spread in 2020, theorists claimed vaccines were lethal bioweapons or linked to autism, while millions insisted the virus itself was a government hoax.
Conspiracy thinking has officially moved from the margins into the mainstream, reshaping how Americans talk about science. Nowhere is that more visible than in the fight over climate change. Surveys show that 15% of Americans do not believe global warming is happening, while most say they rarely or never discuss it with family or friends. That number might seem small, but it represents tens of millions of Americans. And skepticism is now seeping into U.S. policymaking, too. The Trump administration most recently partnered with the right-wing nonprofit PragerU to produce AI-generated educational videos for children that cast doubt on climate science. Alongside the spread of climate fatalism—the belief that the crisis is inevitable—this erosion of trust threatens to stall action at the moment it is most urgent.
In this atmosphere of suspicion, discussing the climate crisis has never been harder. The 2021 movie Don’t Look Up captured that frustration perfectly: In one scene, a panicked newscaster tries desperately to warn the world of a comet hurtling towards Earth, screaming into the camera, “Are we not being clear? We’re all 100% for sure gonna fucking die!” After its release, NASA data scientist Peter Kalmus wrote in a Guardian essay, “This is what it feels like to be a climate scientist today.”
“At first, the conspiracy was that climate change doesn’t exist. And then, denialists shifted to saying it does exist, but it’s natural.”
Few people have felt that collision between politics and science more directly than Laura Faye Tenenbaum. A former senior science editor for NASA’s Global Climate Change website, she spent a decade at the Jet Propulsion Lab and wrote about the censorship she faced under Trump’s first term. On a video call, she’s sharp, funny, and foul-mouthed, cracking no-nonsense jokes from her floral couch. That irreverence has earned her 150,000 TikTok followers, where she turns climate science into campy, easy-to-understand skits.
“At first, the conspiracy was that climate change doesn’t exist,” she said. “And then, denialists shifted to saying it does exist, but it’s natural.” She points to the infamous moment when Senator James Inhofe hauled a snowball onto the Senate floor as “proof” that global warming was a myth. “It’s very, very cold out. Very unseasonable,” he had said. NASA responded with an in-depth explainer of why snowstorms don’t disprove global warming, outlining that “not only are severe snowstorms possible in a warming climate, they may even be more likely.”
In 2019, Tenenbaum covered the 13th Heritage Foundation Climate Conference, long a hub for climate denialism, held that year at Washington’s Trump International Hotel. She recalls the event in comedic detail: the juxtaposition of gilded chandeliers and the smell of mildew, a sea of white men in dark suits, and one attendee who insisted that because carbon dioxide makes up only 0.04% of Earth’s atmosphere, it couldn’t possibly drive climate change. Tenenbaum responded by asking if he’d be happy to drink a soda containing 0.04% cyanide. “Think of a ghost pepper,” she said. “You don’t need very much of it to be completely on fire.”
Even so, conspiracy theorists typically believe they’re speaking truth to power. As YouTuber Natalie Wynn, better known as ContraPoints, explains in her three-hour video essay on America’s conspiracy obsession, it often comes down to the mantra: “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” Conspiracy theories, Wynn said, tend to rely on “us versus them” rhetoric. It’s why they’re so popular amongst the far-right: to white nationalists, “them” means immigrants, asylum seekers, people of color; to anti-semites, “them” means Jewish communities writ large. In the case of climate conspiracies, “them” means climate scientists.
This paranoia reached a fever pitch in 2009, when hackers leaked the emails of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, the most controversial of which contained requests to delete email threads and referenced a trick being done to “hide the decline.” The emails were investigated, their controversies debunked. Still, the scandal—dubbed “Climategate”—fueled claims that climate research had been exaggerated, manipulated, or outright fabricated. Phil Jones, the unit’s director, received hundreds of graphic death threats. Years of his work were dragged through the mud and smeared, but repeated investigations showed that the science ultimately held up. As Fiona Fox, head of the United Kingdom’s Science Media Centre, told The Guardian: “British climate science was subjected to huge scrutiny by the world’s best journalists and it stood up to the test.”
“Irreversible damage has been done, but a new generation of climate activists refuses to give in. For them, surrendering only hands victory to the same “wealthy elites” so loathed by conspiracy theorists.”
For Rosie Semlyen, a graduate student at Columbia University’s Climate School who has written extensively about climate conspiracies, the appeal lies in their simplicity. “They gain traction because climate change itself is hard to wrap our heads around,” she told Atmos. “There’s no single villain you can point to, and its causes and effects are spread across geographies and timelines.” The crisis is everything from melting permafrost to wildfires and floods, which Semlyen said have “become so normalized that we forget their frequency and intensity are not ‘natural.’” Against this global behemoth, conspiracy theories provide a false sense of clarity and a refuge for fear.
Semlyen has seen that fear up close. A loved one, she recalls, “spent every morning tracking chemtrails, comparing flight maps, and trying to match them to patterns in local weather. [They are] genuinely fearful and are trying to make sense of a world that feels unpredictable and untrustworthy.”
It’s in everyone’s best interest to make climate science more accessible, more engaging. In her TED talk, Tenenbaum demonstrated thermal inertia by holding a flame under two balloons: one filled with water, the other with air. The water balloon absorbed the heat; the empty balloon popped. It’s the same principle that explains why Earth’s oceans store 90% of the excess heat from global warming. When she later asked students to recreate NASA’s explainer video on the phenomenon, they turned it into a creative mash-up complete with costumes and AC/DC blasting in the background. “People played dress-up, they loved the creativity,” she said.
For Tenenbaum, this is the future of climate communication. She believes that ditching jargon and making science engaging is critical to rebuilding trust. “People don’t want to be talked down to,” she said, noting that the students she talks to often don’t feel they can relate to scientists—a gap that fuels suspicion. That accessibility matters because it pushes back against the most insidious climate conspiracy of all: that the fight is already lost. “Climate fatalism is the most common and most dangerous narrative,” added Semlyen. “It’s this idea that nothing can be done, that the problem is inevitable, and any effort to stop it is pointless.”
Conspiracy theories often grow out of powerlessness and distrust. Sometimes, they even contain a kernel of truth: the chemtrail myth, for example, is inspired by real histories of chemical warfare trials. In today’s “post-truth” landscape, supercharged by widespread content moderation rollbacks across social media platforms, misinformation and fake news spread faster than facts. Meanwhile, well-funded disinformation campaigns, boosted by bots and platform algorithms, give conspiracy theories more reach than science ever receives.
Irreversible damage has been done, but a new generation of climate activists refuses to give in. For them, surrendering only hands victory to the same “wealthy elites” so loathed by conspiracy theorists. Because when it comes to fighting the climate crisis, “we already have the answers,” said Semlyen. “What’s missing is the political will, and that will only come from large numbers of ordinary people engaging and refusing to give up.”
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How Did Climate Conspiracy Theories Go Mainstream?
