How do climate alarmists expect us to care about their causes when they can’t accurately disseminate information from experts?
International climate alarmist Greta Thunberg, a 21-year-old Swede with a passion for left-wing causes, warned the world in 2018 that humanity has five years to stop using fossil fuels or all humanity will be wiped out.
The deleted social media post – a tweet on the platform then known as Twitter – can be found via an image of another post below.
Five years ago Greta Thunberg tweeted that
“Climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels in the next five years.”
The tweet has now been deleted.https://t.co/qLzZxJDJJG pic.twitter.com/Wfnjkv2wS5
— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) June 21, 2023
While Thunberg’s post doesn’t say that humanity will be finished in five years – we’re done by 2023 – there are obvious problems. The article Thunberg linked to misquotes a scientist who made a relevant comment.
In January 2018, James Anderson, a professor of atmospheric chemistry at Harvard, gave a speech that was covered by Forbes.
Anderson spoke in his speech about the damage he claims climate change is doing to “permanent ice” at the Earth’s poles, and the implications for the globe, according to Forbes.
“The chance that there will be permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero,” he said, according to Forbes. “Can we lose 75-80 percent of the permanent ice and recover? The answer is no.”
Forbes article published January 15, 2018.
On February 19, 2018, the Grit Post – a leftist online publication with the motto “real news for the working class” – used a Forbes piece as a source for a now-deleted article titled: “Top Climate Scientists: Humans Will Go Extinct if We Don’t Fix Climate Change in the year 2023.
The headline reads: “Top climate scientists warn that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels in the next five years.”
(The article has since been removed, but the internet archive lives on.)
This is the report that Thunberg cites.
In a 2023 article, The Associated Press examined the controversy surrounding Thunberg’s deleted posts – and defended Thunberg, naturally, as the victim of bad sources and malicious attacks from conservative websites.
In a statement to the AP for their report, Anderson pushed back against Grit Post’s framing of the speech. He said, “‘wiping out of humanity by 2022’ is a total distortion of what I said or meant at the University of Chicago colloquium in 2018. I would never say something like that.”
The timeline above is enough to make anyone’s head spin. Here is a summary:
Anderson gave a speech in January 2018 that Forbes reported that same month.
Grit Post wrote its own piece in February 2018, mostly quoted from Forbes. Grit Post puts “human extinction” and “wiping out all humanity” into the conversation as part of the article.
Thunberg – in June 2018, six years ago this month – posted a link to the Grit Post article and quoted the opening sentence.
Thunberg deleted the tweet in 2023 which is exciting, as it marks the fifth year.
What is interesting is that the AP took Thunberg’s deletion of the tweet, not to blame her for sensationalism, but to defend her. AP took to protect Thunberg against conservatives – obviously the real culprits – who mocked him for the deletion of his post.
Now six years removed from this conundrum, the real issue is how the left uses children to promote its agenda. Thunberg is a young woman today, but made herself a climate celebrity at a young age with a gift for bombastic speech.
The AP report did not condemn him for circulating the article that misquoted Anderson. The article even criticized conservatives who followed him for deleting the tweet.
The establishment media is quick to check the conservative voices who would dare to follow Thunberg.
Now an adult, Thunberg was used as a pawn as a child. His cover was perfect – a young man who could say something rude, as a child. On the left, he is reported to have mental and emotional problems, the fact that he has been diagnosed with Aspberger’s syndrome and has battled depression, only makes him more untouchable.
It’s time we start holding them to a higher standard. Maybe then we’ll see that most of what they say is nonsense – and sometimes dangerous nonsense.
More importantly, we need to understand the mindset of those who use them for political purposes.
This article first appeared in The Western Journal.
