Is it true that Greta Thunberg deleted a tweet predicting the end of the world by 2023?

In March 2023, a rumor spread across the Internet that a Swedish environmental activist had deleted her five-year-old publication, in which she predicted the death of humanity by this time. We checked whether this rumor is true.

The fact that Thunberg deleted her 2018 tweet with a disappointing forecast for the next five years was written by such publications as Lenta.ru, "News», "Evening Moscow", "Eastern feed news"(all three - with reference to New York Post), Teleprogramma.pro And "Reedus" Information also spread on Telegram - in particular, thanks to the channels “Kornilov"(384,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Solovyov"(336,000), "Heavenly" (173,000), "Ostashko! Important"(120,000) and 360tv (110,000). On VKontakte, the news aroused great interest in the public pages “Rhymes and punches" (352,000 views) and "Science and technology"(100,000). Many similar publications were accompanied by a screenshot of Thunberg's tweet.

Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg gained worldwide fame in September 2019 when she, then a 16-year-old girl, spoke at the UN Climate Change Summit in New York. Thunberg's emotional speech, accusing world leaders of inaction and declaring that they stole her childhood and dreams, caused conflicting reactions among ordinary people and experts, but left few people indifferent. Since then, the girl has become not only a regular news on environmental topics, but also the heroine of many memes.

The Internet Archive preserves Thunberg, who is now missing from his verified account. tweet dated June 21, 2018, the text of which matches what we see in the screenshot. On March 11, 2023, around noon Moscow time, this publication still existed (we can judge this from the most recent archival copy), but already in the evening of the same day users began asking the activist questions regarding the removal of the post. However, let's carefully read what it says.

“A leading climate scientist warns that climate change will destroy all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels within the next five years.” It turns out that Thunberg did not claim that humanity will perish in five years - the quote she cited only stated the need to abandon certain energy resources during this period in order to prevent the future destruction of humanity.

The tweet also includes link to the article, which has also now been deleted, but preserved in the Internet Archive. The publication posted on February 19, 2018 on the GritPost resource talks about a speech at the University of Chicago James Anderson - Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry at Harvard. According to the article, Anderson warned that climate change is pushing the Earth back to the era Eocenewhen there was no ice at either pole. According to the scientist, as a result of pollution, the thickness of the ozone layer in the atmosphere has decreased to its minimum level in the last 12 million years and current measures to reduce emissions are clearly insufficient. To prevent human extinction, Anderson is calling for a sort of “Marshall Plan,” in which the entire world would have to take drastic measures to completely phase out fossil fuels within the next five years. “The likelihood that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is virtually zero,” the professor is alleged to have said (and was obviously wrong). The words that Thunberg quoted in her tweet are included in the GritPost lead note as a brief summary and generally correspond to the content of the article. But how true is this article?

The article on GritPost refers to the publication of a much more well-known and authoritative resource - Forbes. The publication became the only major Internet site to cover Anderson's performance in Chicago at the beginning of 2018. The content of the article in Forbes differs little from that written on GritPost, with one small but important exception: in it Anderson, mentioning a five-year period for taking action, does not say anything about the extinction of humanity - only about the possibility of avoiding irreversible climate change. However, since even Forbes did not have the full text of the lecture, Associated Press fact checkers, after rumors spread about the deletion of Thunberg’s tweet contacted to the scientist with clarifying questions.

In a response letter, Anderson called “complete fiction” the talk about his prediction of the death of humanity in five years. According to the scientist, at the seminar he paid attention to the latest trends in changes in the volume of Arctic sea ice. Moreover, the forecast he made did not concern all the ice in the Arctic, but only the ice floes in the Arctic Ocean. “This is a complete misrepresentation of what I said or meant at the 2018 University of Chicago Colloquium. I would never make such a statement,” Anderson concluded. Let us note that the forecasts of Anderson’s colleagues regarding when the summer (that is, not melting even in the warm season) Arctic sea ice will completely disappear - they call it 2035 year and 2050th.

Thus, even the statement that Greta Thunberg actually referred to was conveyed incorrectly in the source she quoted. There was no talk about the destruction of humanity - not in five years, not at all. At the same time, the environmental activist’s tweet, published in 2018, was actually deleted in March 2023.

Cover photo: Media.

Half-truth

What do our verdicts mean?

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