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Last year, we should have all been dead, according to an old tweet from climate activist Greta Thunberg.
On June 21, 2018, Thunberg shared a link to a story addressing the planet’s dire predicament with the message, “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.”
So it’s now been six years since that tweet went up. It has since been deleted, but those who aren’t fans of Thunberg certainly like to bring up her old message — and the fact that the world has not come to an end.
“This tweet is now six years old,” the account EndWokeness posted, along with a screenshot of the original tweet.
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“EVERYTHING ‘top’ scientists have predicted has been wrong about ‘climate change,’” one person wrote.
Another added: “Climate extremists are always wrong. That’s why we’re still here.
“How many times can they say the sky is falling before people wake up to this nonsense?,” a third person asked.
It has since been pointed out by internet fact-checkers that Thunberg didn’t actually write that the world would end five years to the date of her original tweet.
Rather, her message was that we should stop using fossil fuels.
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The screengrab of the tweet included a link to an article by the website gritpost.com, “Top Climate Scientist: Humans Will Go Extinct if We Don’t Fix Climate Change by 2023.”
While the link is no longer available, there are stories that refer to parts of a January 2018 speech from scientist James Anderson.
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While Anderson did not say that humanity will be wiped out in five years, an article paraphrased parts of his speech and was published on the site Grit Post — which Thunberg linked to, at the time.
That speech was about how carbon levels in the atmosphere were causing Earth’s polar ice caps to rapidly disappear to a point at which reducing emissions wouldn’t be enough to stop or reverse it.
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Anderson previously told the Associated Press that the focus of the statement was on the floating ice volume and the observed rate of disappearance at that time.
“That is a complete fabrication of what I said,” referring to the claims he said humanity would be wiped out in five years.
“Thus the statement was clear to those in attendance that the reference was to floating ice volume in the data shown on the slide, not arctic ice in general,” Anderson clarified, adding, “so, the ‘wiping out of humanity by 2022’ is a total distortion of what I said or meant at the University of Chicago colloquium in 2018.”
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