Newsweek runs FALSE 'fact check' claiming Greta Thunberg didn’t tweet the world will end in 2023 even though she did

In 2018, teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, who famously dropped out of school because she was so anxious about climate change ending the world that she could not focus on her studies, shared an article on Twitter about the predicted end times. Later, she deleted the tweet.

The post, from 2018, stated that the world would come crashing to an end in five years. The world did not end, and Thunberg deleted the tweet. But for Newsweek, claims that Thunbgerg deleted the tweet after the world did not end are "false." Their reason? Because those who noted that Thunberg deleted the tweet didn't address the claims made in the article she shared.

"The tweet that Thunberg allegedly sent referenced an article that did not say the world would end by 2023," Newsweek's fact check reads. 

Thunberg did share an article, titled "Top Climate Scientist: Humans Will Go Extinct if We Don't Fix Climate Change by 2023," and she clipped a portion of that article that read "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."

The article was published in 2018. The article said that "climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years." Five years from 2018 is 2023. Perhaps Newsweek was trying to say that it was the need to end fossil fuels that had the five-year timeline attached to it, and not that if the use of fossil fuels is not stopped within five years then humanity would be wiped out by that point, but this is a very spurious differentiation. 

Newsweek does not suggest that the climate scientist's prediction has simply not yet come to pass, instead, they indicate that Thunberg and the article were saying that the effect of not ceasing use of fossil fuels would be irreversible. Perhaps Newsweek would like to offer a new date by which humanity will be wiped out since the warning was not heeded?

Newsweek doesn't say. Instead, they say that Thunberg, now 20, "has been called out by right-leaning commentators for allegedly deleting a tweet predicting that five years ago humanity would be wiped out because of its use of fossil fuels." They quote this outlet, along with Jack Posobiec, Dinesh D'Souza, Charlie Kirk, and Brigitte Gabriel who all note that Thunberg said that not stopping the use of fossil fuels within five years would end humanity. 

Thunberg quoted the article from the now defunct site, and that article, as well as the climate scientist referenced, is what Newsweek primarily writes about. However, they note that a speech from that scientists "is not available online to corroborate whether these changes would have an annihilative effect, as the article Thunberg is thought to have quoted said."

And it is without evidence that Newsweek claims that the assertion "that Thunberg deleted the tweet recently because the world has not ended this year is clearly misleading." Yet that in itself is misleading, as this outlet, as well as others, noted that the tweet had been deleted after the world did not end. Both of those things are true. 

The world is still profiting substantially from the use of fossil fuels. 

While many, many predictions have been made as to the fate of the world due to this practice, which is also responsible for lifting people out of poverty worldwide, each and every prediction, from Al Gore's declarations to John Kerry's to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to various and sundry climate scientists to Greta Thungerg, not one of them has come true. 

Tucker Carlson picked up the deletion as well, noting that the "experts," who keep predicting the end of the world if the world does not correct its fossil fuel sins, should not be trusted.

"We absolutely should not trust them," Carlson said. And he's right.

In 2009, Kerry said "The truth, is that the threat we face is not an abstract concern for the future. Scientists project that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer of 2013. Not in 2050, but four years from now." That didn't happen.

In 2019, AOC said, "the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don't address climate change." 2032 is not yet upon us, so perhaps we will have to wait for the internet to memory-hole these comments in 2032 before we take AOC to task for being wrong on her apocalypse prediction, but it sure doesn't seem at all likely.

Al Gore, former VP to Bill Clinton turned climate activist, said in 2009 the northern polar ice cap had a 75 percent chance of disappearing by 2016. It's seven years on from that date, and those ice caps are still extant.

In 2020, Thunberg spoke to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, saying that "With today’s emissions levels, the remaining budget is gone in less than eight years. These aren’t anyone’s views. This is the science." She was citing "the International Panel on Climate Change’s 2018 damning report about the scale of the climate crisis."

The world is still here. The tweet is still deleted. The predictions of the fossil fuel-fueled apocalypse continue to mount, and continue, simply by the continued, resilient existence of humanity on this earth, to be disproven.