This TED Talk features climate change activist Greta Thunberg recorded live at TEDx Stockholm, 2018.

When I was about eight years old, I first heard about something called climate change or global warming.

Apparently that was something humans had created by our way of living.

I was told to turn off the lights to save energy and to recycle paper to save resources.

I remember thinking that it was very strange that humans who are an animal species, among others,

could be capable of changing the Earth's climate.

Because if we were, and if it was really happening,

we wouldn't be talking about anything else.

As soon as you turn on the TV, everything would be about that.

Headlines, radio, newspapers, you would never read or hear about anything else,

as if there was a world war going on.

But no one ever talked about it.

If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence,

how could we just continue like before?

Why were there no restrictions?

Why wasn't it made illegal? To me, that did not add up.

It was too unreal.

So when I was 11, I became ill.

I fell into depression.

I stopped talking and I stopped eating. In two months I lost about 10 kilos of weight.

Later on I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, OCD and selective mutism.

That basically means I only speak when I think's necessary. Now is one of those moments.

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