Climate change activist Greta Thunberg has brushed off US President Donald Trump’s sarcastic tweet, saying ‘it doesn’t make a difference’.
The 16-year-old shook the world at the United Nations Climate Summit on Monday (September 23), leaping into a powerful speech about how the grown-ups have betrayed her generation with a lack of action.
Donald Trump later mocked Thunberg with a tweet reading: ‘She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!’. But the young activist isn’t the slightest bit bothered about the president’s attempt at ridicule.
Check out the video of Thunberg on Scandinavian talk show, Skavlan:
Thunberg has already taken the higher ground, adopting Trump’s comment as her new Twitter and Facebook bio.
When asked about the POTUS’s tweet by the show’s host, Fredrik Skavlan, Thunberg said:
I mean, you can interpret it in different ways, many different ways.
I knew that sometime he is probably going to say something about me and it was like, it doesn’t make any difference in a way.
Quite admirable that the teenager is maturer than the leader of the western world.
When Skavlan asked Thunberg whether she saw any sarcasm in the tweet, she said: ‘Of course I do… but of course he’s going to write that.’
The UN summit, entitled ‘A Race We Can Win. A Race We Must Win’ and convened by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, is intended to confront the crisis of global warming and rising fossil fuel emissions.
Check out the video of Thunberg’s emotional speech below:
In the speech, Thunberg told delegates:
This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you have come to us young people for hope. How dare you.
People are suffering. People are dying and dying ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is the money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you.
For more than 30 years the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.
As well as capturing the internet with her words, an eternal image emerged from the summit: Thunberg catching sight of Trump, and giving him an ice-cold, Paddington hard stare.
Skavlan and documentary-maker Michael Moore, who was also on the show, commented on the young activist’s glare, joking that Trump could probably feel it even if he didn’t see it.
But Thunberg was very composed, explaining: ‘I was stopped because suddenly he came in and security said ‘you have to step to the side’. Then I just wondered what was going on and then he showed up, I think I was very shocked.’
Thunberg also fired back in a series of tweets, writing:
It seems they will cross every possible line to avert the focus, since they are so desperate not to talk about the climate and ecological crisis. Being different is not an illness and the current, best available science is not opinions – it’s facts.
I honestly don’t understand why adults would choose to spend their time mocking and threatening teenagers and children for promoting science, when they could do something good instead. I guess they must simply feel so threatened by us.
But don’t waste your time giving them any more attention. The world is waking up. Change is coming whether they like it or not.
Although, Trump isn’t the only one from the right-side of politics criticising Thunberg: climate change movement sceptic Michael Knowles called her ‘a mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents and by the international left’.
Check out the fiery exchange below:
Fellow pundit Chris Hahn was audibly outraged, telling Knowles:
Relax, skinny boy I’ve got this. You’re attacking a child, you’re a grown man. Have some couth.
Maybe on your podcast you get away and say whatever you want because nobody’s listening. You’re on national television. Be a grown-up when you’re talking about children.
She’s trying to save the planet because your president doesn’t believe in climate change. And kids need to take to the streets to worry about their future. You are despicable for speaking about her like that, and you should apologise on national television, right now.
Knowles did not apologise and instead replied:
She is mentally ill. She has autism. She has obsessive compulsive disorder, she has selective mutism. She had depression.
It’s a damning picture when grown adults resort to such depravity to try and tear down a teenage girl who’s, quite literally, changing the world. We stand with you, Greta.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.