The climate campaigner claimed in 2018 that humanity had until this year to prevent its demise
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has deleted a 2018 tweet in which she shared a warning that climate change “will wipe out all of humanity” unless fossil fuels are phased out by 2023.
In the tweet, Thunberg quoted a “leading climate scientist” as saying that “climate change will wipe out all of humanity if we don’t stop using fossil fuels in the next five years.”
It is unclear when the self-described “autistic climate justice activist” deleted the tweet, but the deletion was first noticed by US conservative pundit Jack Posobiec on Saturday. The website her tweet linked to no longer exists.
Thunberg herself did not respond to Posobiec, and a host of right-wing commentators chimed in to remind her that the world actually still exists.
“Greta Thunberg deleted this tweet because it exposes her to be a fraud,” US conservative activist Brigitte Gabriel tweeted. “Make sure the whole world sees it.”
Thunberg may not have predicted the end of humanity in 2023. As some commentators pointed out, she may have argued that the human race was facing extinction at some unspecified time in the future if fossil fuels had not been eliminated this year.
The Swedish champion has made similar predictions in the past. In a speech to the United Nations in 2019, she argued that “irreversible chain reactions beyond human control” would take place unless carbon emissions could be reduced by more than 50% by 2030. Speaking at the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering in Davos a year later, she declared that humanity has eight years to “completely abandon fossil fuels.”
Environmentalists have a long history of doomsday predictions. Scientists warned in the early 20th century that global cooling would make large parts of North America uninhabitable, while biologist Paul Ehrlich argued in the 1970s that rising temperatures would cause mass starvation in Britain by 2000.
In ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ from 2006, former US Vice President Al Gore declared that melting polar ice caps would lead to the displacement of hundreds of millions of people by 2013. When his prediction looked like it would not come true, his office called dating a “ball park”.
(RT.com)
Source: sn.dk