Greta Thunberg, in full Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg, the Swedish environmental activist who worked to address the problem of climate change is celebrating her birthday on January 3. She  was born on January 3, 2003, Stockholm, Sweden.

Her father was an actor, and her mother sang in the opera. Greta was identified as having the now-classified autistic spectrum disorder known as Asperger syndrome (ASD). Similar to classic autism, it is marked by difficulties in social interaction but has normal IQ and language development. 

Asperger syndrome sufferers frequently concentrate intensely on a single concept or hobby, and Thunberg's cause was climate change. She initially became aware of the problem when she was around eight years old, and within a few years she adjusted her own lifestyle by being vegan and refraining from flying. (Aircraft and cattle both release a lot of the gases that cause global warming.)

Thunberg was asked to talk about climate change on multiple occasions. She spoke before the legislatures of Italy, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States in addition to the European Parliament and the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 

She attended a UN climate gathering in New York City in September 2019 and was particularly well-known for her passionate remarks: "You have taken my aspirations and my youth with your meaningless platitudes... All you talk about is money and myths of endless economic expansion while we are at the start of a catastrophic extinction.  The "Greta impact" that Thunberg had on certain people was credited with changing their attitudes and behaviours toward climate change, but she was not without her critics. In 2019, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro famously referred to her as a "brat."

Watch the Top 10 events of 2022 that shaped the world