Climate activist Greta Thunberg has deleted a 2018 tweet warning that “climate change will wipe out all of humanity” by 2023 if fossil fuel usage continued.
The 20-year-old Swedish activist’s tweet referred to a grim warning from Harvard University professor of atmospheric chemistry James Anderson, who claimed that pollution as a result of burning fossil fuels is pushing the climate back 33 million years to an era when there were no ice caps at the pole.
The tweet, dated June 21, 2018, quoted an article that cited Anderson, stating, “A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.”
However, the article from the now-defunct Gritpost.com does not accurately summarize Anderson’s remarks, which he made while speaking at the University of Chicago in 2018.
Anderson is not quoted in the article saying the end of humanity is just years away, but rather that changes must be made by 2023 to stop irreparable damage to the ice caps.
“The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero,” Anderson is quoted as saying at the University of Chicago in the Grift.com story linked in Thunberg’s tweet.
Conservative commentators pounced earlier this week on claims that the 20-year-old Swedish activist had pulled back on her claims that the world would come to an end in just five years.
Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, wrote in a tweet Sunday,
“One of the best headlines of the year so far… ‘Greta Thunberg deletes 2018 tweet saying world will end in 2023 after world does not end.’”
Conservative commentator Jack Posobiec, who was cited as a source for right-leaning Post Millennial’s story that Thunberg had deleted the tweet, also posted a screengrab of Thunberg’s tweet on Sunday with the comment, “Hi @GretaThunberg! Why did you delete this?”
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