The elitist media always presume that everyone pushing climate doom represents Science, and when their extremely gloomy predictions don’t pan out, no one has any desire to revisit those claims.
When Time anointed then 16-year-old Greta Thunberg as “Person of the Year” in 2019, she was treated like an expert, when she absolutely wasn’t one: “Where others speak the language of hope, Thunberg repeats the unassailable science: Oceans will rise. Cities will flood. Millions of people will suffer....”
That was odd. Thunberg tweeted out climate scare porn June 21, 2018, quoting the ramblings of now-defunct leftist website Gritpost, which railed, “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.”
When a number of critics circled back to ratio the since-deleted tweet five years later in 2023, a number of fact-checkers like FactCheck.org, Snopes and others twisted themselves into crazy-shaped pretzels to shield Thunberg from public humiliation. It’s now been just over 8 years since that tweet was posted, and the media gaslighting reads just as stupid today as it did then.
This tweet is about to turn 8 years old pic.twitter.com/ILqLnohilE
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) June 20, 2026
Then-FactCheck.org undergraduate fellow Hadleigh Zinsner kicked off her June 28, 2023, fact-check by pointing out that the article Thunberg cited supposedly misquoted an analysis by Harvard University professor James Anderson. That literally had nothing to do with the tweet at hand or the context behind Thunberg’s tweet. But Zinsner went to bat for Thunberg anyway: “With the fifth anniversary of her tweet recently passed, social media posts have falsely claimed that Thunberg predicted human extinction would occur by 2023.” Ironically, it was Zinsner who committed an eisegetical error of her own by inserting her own interpretation of Thunberg’s tweet:
But Thunberg’s 2018 tweet did not say that humanity would be wiped out in five years, but rather that continued use of fossil fuels over the next five years would lead to human extinction at some point.
The “[a]t some point” context appears nowhere in the original tweet, which clearly implied a cataclysmic event was on the horizon in five years if fossil fuels weren’t eliminated. Zinsner, in effect, just shoe-horned her own spin to make Thunberg’s end-of-the-world emphasis seem anything remotely close to rational.
The satire-haters over at Snopes didn’t fare much better with their Thunberg narrative-twisting. Then-Snopes “fact-checker” Alex Kasprak hurled a cowardly “Mixture” truth rating at Thunberg’s detractors, accusing “conservative pundits” of having “misread the claim.”
Kasprak snorted that the “tweet, and the underlying article, never actually asserted that humanity would end in the year 2023.” Except, that’s exactly what the tweet and the article quote Thunberg shared implied verbatim, regardless of whether or not they mis-represented Anderson’s core arguments. It’s not until the bottom of the article that Kasprak teased that the direct quote Thunberg posted was an “imprecise paraphrase” of Anderson’s comments.
To be clear: It was Thunberg and Gritpost that “misread” Anderson’s claims, not the “conservative pundits.” Thunberg posting a direct quote of an “imprecise paraphrase” from an article embellishing the doom narrative is not the fault of her critics. The gaffe lies squarely with Thunberg and the publication that published that line twisting Anderson’s sentiments to mean something they apparently didn’t. Classic Snopes: when the prophecy flops, just blame everyone except the cult mascot who amplified it.
Over at the Associated Press, then-misinformation reporter Sophia Tulp managed to take Kasprak’s entire fallacy and compress it into one paragraph, blaming Thunberg’s critics for “missing context” as opposed to Thunberg and Gritpost for misquoting Anderson:
AP’S ASSESSMENT: Missing context. While Thunberg did delete a 2018 tweet about the urgency of addressing climate change, she did not say the world would end in 2023. Her tweet included a quote from an article that said an influential scientist warned climate change “will wipe out all humanity” unless fossil fuel use was ended ‘over the next five years.’ Further complicating the issue, that article incorrectly summarized the scientist’s speech. He never made such comments.
Uh, hello! Do these uppity journos even read what they write?
Newsweek fact-check reporter Tom Norton went for the jugular by slapping Thunberg’s critics with an emphatic “FALSE” rating and proceeded to cast doubt on whether the climate activist’s tweet was even real. ”All of the tweets refer to a screengrab of a message, allegedly posted by Greta Thunberg on June 21, 2018, that stated: ‘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,’” Norton spun. “Allegedly?” The tweet was literally archived multiple times between 2019 and 2023 before Norton’s “fact-check” even went live on the Newsweek website in March 2023.
Norton’s headline for the piece read as follows, “Fact Check: Did Greta Thunberg Delete Claim That Humanity Will End by 2023?” Did Norton just pretend the tweet didn’t exist? Norton proceeded to straight-up lie to readers, making it appear that the Gritpost article and Thunberg’s corresponding tweet didn’t actually say what they clearly stated:
However, the claim that Thunberg deleted the tweet recently because the world has not ended this year is clearly misleading. Even if the original article Thunberg quoted may have misrepresented Anderson's comments, it did not claim (and nor did Anderson) that the world would end by 2023.”
To quote Maury Povich, “The lie detector test determined that was a lie." How dare you!
