Those who say climate change is a threat to the planet continue to call for actions against climate skeptics.
On May 19, PBS’ “Moyers & Company” played a clip of scientist, David Suzuki, calling for politicians skeptical of man-made climate change to “be thrown in the slammer.” On day later, a tweet by well-known alarmist Michael Mann suggested that skepticism could be a “crime against humanity.” As least far back as 2006, and as recently as March 2014, liberal journalists and radical scientists have advocated punishing people who doubt catastrophic, man-made climate change.
A writer at Grist.org once called for a kind of “climate Nuremberg” and had to apologize and amend his remarks, while scientists have publicly demanded imprisonment or even “the death penalty.”
On May 20, Michael Mann, a climatologist who is often interviewed by media outlets to warn about the threat of global warming, tweeted a 2010 article from The Guardian (UK) that asked “Is climate science disinformation a crime against humanity?” He called that question “more relevant today than in 2010.”
This article, written by Donald Brown decried climate skeptics as “extraordinarily morally reprehensible.” Brown even called on “the international community” to “find a way of classifying extraordinarily irresponsible scientific claims that could lead to mass suffering as some type of crime against humanity.”
Ironically, Mann is currently embroiled in a lawsuit attempting to conceal email correspondence from his time at the University of Virginia from Freedom of Information Act requests. This lawsuit has been joined by 17 major news groups, though conspicuously not the broadcast networks, CNN or The New York Times.
Even before his recent PBS appearance, Suzuki called for the jailing of skeptics in two major 2008 speeches. Suzuki, who regularly gives media interviews and writes for The Huffington Post, asked a Montreal business conference to “see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail” and called skepticism “a criminal act.”
