Doubting climate change 'crime against humanity'

A professor of ethics at Penn State University is accusing skeptics of man-made climate change of being responsible for a "new crime against humanity."

According to a video posted by Campus Reform Online, Donald Brown, a professor of Environmental Ethnics, Science and Law at Penn State, stated, "We should encourage a conversation whether this is some kind of new crime against humanity."

He continued: "It's really evil stuff."

The comments took place at a panel discussion titled "Changing the Moral Climate on Climate Change" at the Penn State campus April 30. Penn State was at the center of the "Climategate" scandal in which hacked emails indicated scientific data was being manipulated amid a scheme to marginalize skeptics.

Oliver Darcy, a regional field coordinator for the Leadership Institute, told WND in an exclusive interview, "They had a host of panelists who talked about how skeptics of climate change are committing crimes against humanity for stalling government actions to curb global warming."

Penn State Professor Michael Mann, who was accused of deleting evidence to hinder the Climategate investigation, also was present at the panel discussion.

"There's the side of science, and then there's the other side which manufactures their own science; they manufacture their own facts," Mann said. "It almost doesn't matter anymore which facts are real facts and which facts are fake facts."

Michael Mann

Mann was responsible for the creation of the "hockey stick graph" used by Al Gore in his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" to argue for a recent spike in average temperature caused by industrialization.

The hacked Climategate emails indicated the graph was created by a "trick" used to force the data into a pattern of steadily increasing temperatures.

Other panelists used their time to attack conservatives in the media and Fox News.

Graduate student Peter Buckland commented, "You can watch Fox News all over campus here if you want to … if you watch Fox News, you are much more likely to believe factually wrong things."

Rick Schuhman of Penn State suggested that radio host Rush Limbaugh disagrees with Gore purely out of greed or to be disagreeable.

"Gore can say the sun comes up in the morning and goes down at night, and Rush Limbaugh would say 'he is a liar,'" he said.

Don Brown

Mann commented to laughter, "As was alluded to earlier, you can find a whole cable network that is willing to throw fake facts about climate change at you and arm you with those fake facts."

Darcy told WND the panel was "light on science and long on invective."

"Most universities would be on the defensive after their own professors were accused of academic fraud," he said. "Instead, PSU doubled down with a panel that didn't seem to talk about how to stop climate change but how to shut down conservatives who even question global warming alarmism. It was an ugly exercise in self-congratulation and insults."

See the exchange: