A Court Fined Greta Thunberg. Then Police Detained her Later That Day.

Greta Thunberg has had a busy week. Just hours after leaving a court on Monday in Malmo, Sweden, where she was fined for disobeying police orders, the 20-year-old went right back to the streets to protest.

Police then forcibly removed her from a street where she and other climate protesters were blocking the path for oil tankers heading to a nearby harbor. Officers dragged her to a police car as she went limp, her knees trailing the ground.

The Malmo court fined Thunberg about $240, although the charge of disobeying the police can carry a prison sentence of up to six months. Defiant in court, Thunberg said: “It’s correct that I was at that place on that day, and it’s correct that I received an order that I didn’t listen to, but I want to deny the crime.”

“We are in an emergency,” she told the court. “Due to that, my acting was legitimate.”

Thunberg’s recent protests coincide with the alarming news that the record-breaking heatwaves in the United States, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere would be “virtually impossible” if it weren’t for climate change. A group of scientists who make up the World Weather Attribution initiative, which studies the role of global warming in extreme weather, said the heatwave in China is “about a one in 250-year event.” China has seen temperatures of 126 degrees Fahrenheit this month.

The initiative’s new study found that “maximum heat like in July 2023 would have been virtually impossible to occur in the U.S./Mexico region and Southern Europe if humans had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels.”

On the same page as Thunberg, the group reports that unless the world “rapidly stops burning fossil fuels, these events will become even more common, and the world will experience heatwaves that are even hotter and longer lasting.” The group warns that in a world that is 2 degrees Celsius (35.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the pre-industrial climate, heatwaves like those experienced across the globe this month would occur every two to five years.

“There is an urgent need for an accelerated roll-out of heat action plans in light of increasing vulnerability driven by the intersecting trends of climate change, population ageing, and urbanization,” the report authors wrote. Action plans can include things like a way to alert to a “heat code” that would establish fast-track access to emergency rooms for patients suffering heat strokes, and the implementation of green infrastructure.

Beyond the practical measures that can be taken, many climate activists believe the only way to stop people from producing and burning fossil fuels is to try something new.

“We cannot save the world by playing by the rules,” Thunberg told journalists after her court appearance.

“We choose to not be bystanders, and instead physically stop the fossil fuel infrastructure," she wrote in an Instagram post. “We are reclaiming the future.”