From The Times
Ed Miliband’s adverts banned for overstating climate change
by Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor
TWO government advertisements that use nursery rhymes to warn people of the dangers of climate change have been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for exaggerating the potential harm.
The adverts, commissioned by Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, used the rhymes to suggest that Britain faces an inevitable increase in storms, floods and heat waves unless greenhouse gas emissions are brought under control.
The ASA has ruled that the claims made in the newspaper adverts were not supported by solid science and has told the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) that they should not be published again.
It has also referred a television commercial to the broadcast regulator, Ofcom, for potentially breaching a prohibition on political advertising.
The rulings will be an embarrassment for Miliband, who has tried to portray his policies as firmly science-based. He had commissioned two posters, four press advertisements and a short film for television and cinema, which started appearing in October last year in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate talks.
They attracted 939 complaints — more than the ASA received for any advertisement last year. The deluge posed problems for the ASA, which is not a scientific body, so it decided to compare the text of Miliband’s adverts with the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Based on that comparison, it ruled that two of the DECC’s adverts had broken the advertising code on three counts: substantiation, truthfulness and environmental claims.
Of the two banned adverts, one depicted three men floating in a bathtub over a flooded British landscape, and the text read: “Rub a dub dub, three men in a tub — a necessary course of action due to flash flooding caused by climate change.”
It then explained: “Climate change is happening. Temperature and sea levels are rising. Extreme weather events such as storms, floods and heat waves will become more frequent and intense. If we carry on at this rate, life in 25 years could be very different.”
The second showed two children peering into a stone well amid an arid, post-climate-change landscape. It read: “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. There was none as extreme weather due to climate change had caused a drought.”
It then added: “Extreme weather conditions such as flooding, heat waves and storms will become more frequent and intense.”
It was these additional claims, rather than the nursery rhymes or illustrations, that fell foul of the ASA, which ruled it was not scientifically possible to make such definitive statements about Britain’s future climate.
The ASA said: “All statements about future climate were based on modelled predictions, which the IPCC report itself stated still involved uncertainties in the magnitude and timing, as well as regional details, of predicted climate change.” It added that both predictions should have been phrased more tentatively.
The ASA did, however, reject other complaints, including one suggesting the DECC adverts were misleading because they presented human-induced climate change as a fact.
Miliband said: “On the one issue where the ASA did not find in our favour, around one word in our print advertising, the science tells us that it is more than 90% likely that there will be more extreme weather events if we don’t act.”
Greg Barker, shadow minister for climate change, said: “It is so unnecessary to exaggerate the risks of global warming, and also counterproductive.”
Read the complete article here
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Here’s the website where the ads originate from ActOnCO2
Here are some of the advertisements in question:
Stu (00:25:42) :
We must preach the sooted-up albedo version of fleece as white as snow:
Mary had a little lamb.
Its fleece was black as charcoal.
And every time it wagged its tail
You could see its little eyes roll.
UK Sceptic (02:03:15) :
They never said we’d get to light the BBQ.
Try this for a send-up of one of the ads.
[ends with profanity ~ ctm]
Wren (22:21:47) :
“After reading the Times article by Jonathan Leake, read ASA’s Final Adjudication, available at guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/13/scienceofclimatechange-climate-change
Now ask yourself if Leak is an accurate reporter?”
===============
On a point of accuracy for you last sentence – that would be ‘Leake’?
Unless there are multiple journalists named Jonathan Leake there seems to be a history of articles by someone so named on the Times/Sunday Times web site. Until very recently wherever they could Leake’s articles gave staunch support to the AGW/HiCC concept. Now they seem to me to be slightly less strident and more seeking likely to seek angles that cover some middle ground. (Not easy in this area of discussion.)
I don’t claim that he (and his sub editors) get it right. But if you claim they are always wrong then at least we who dislike the idea of paying for government propaganda of any stripe can take comfort that several hundred articles written about climate science by Mr. Leake since the start of the millennia can also be considered highly suspect.
Since those articles may then be directly compared with all the others written by different journalists at the time it would suggest that you are saying that almost the entire body of journalistic output related to AGW/HiCC for the last 10 years is suspect.
Is that what you are saying? Or are you simply spouting opinions from the Deltoid who, interestingly, seemed not to be too interested in publishing the list of Leake articles that I had prepared some weeks ago and offered to him as evidence for his anti-Leake campaign.
For the record – I am naturally suspicious of press articles no matter the side(s) of a subject they seem to put forward. Re-hashed press releases are the least acceptable. ‘Investigative’ work can be more pertintent but that is not guaranteed. Once a suitable amount of material has been read one can make the likely adjustments to content from different writers and sources quite readily. I think I get better than 90% accuracy.
UK politicians are such pompous self-deluded morons I think that the adverts should be run as unintentioned self-mockery.
It’s hardly going to convert the undecided and it’s propaganda of the Ho Chi Minh variety. At least come gangster rap would have given it street cred, but this is Marxist propaganda devised by the suburban elite.
Having lost the scientific argument they should at least be allowed to have the best nursery rhyme. The UK will have no problem with emission targets the way our economy is going. Maybe that’s what it’s all about – making us have something to feel happy about as our industry disappears.
“TonyB (00:11:44) :
This seems a very appropriate time to link again to my article carried here and at Air vent
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/crossing-the-rubicon-an-advert-to-change-hearts-and-minds/
”
Thanks for the link. Are such plans really underway? The introduction of a CO2 quota system in a way equals the Cuban unit payment and has interesting repercussions on the value of money. It also offers interesting possibilities for shady dealings. Do they still drive that forward in the UK?
The trouble is that we all suffer from (marxist-defined) false consciousness. We need to pay these idiots to tell us what to believe- Flash Gordon and his pet Milipede. I even got a dose yesterday when listening to a radio programme on double-entry bookkeeping. The tosh about carbon footprints. When all our politicians and the British Bucket Company go on carbon-free diets, I shall listen to what they say, but only after the first 6 months, just to test their sincerity.
These ads have NOT been banned. Your Headline is completely wrong! Please correct it.
I too complained to the ASA about the Act on CO2 “Bedtime Story” ad and received the adjudication in full a couple of days ago. I am outraged that the response. The covering letter states in its opening paragraph:
“The ASA Broadcast Council considered that the TV ad did not breach the Code in any respect, for the reasons set out in the enclosed adjudication. The same ad is also currently being shown in cinemas and, as far as the Codes are concerned, following the Council’s decision, it can continue to be so.”
It is a complete whitewash.
You can read the full adjudication document here
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/13/scienceofclimatechange-climate-change
Wren (22:21:47) :
Wren (22:52:09) :
The Guardian is the Government’s mouthpiece, of course it said that.
But just read the last line of the Adjudication.
Those Adverts SHOULD NOT APPEAR IN THEIR CURRENT FORM.
If you live in the UK you would know that our children are being Brainwashed by these adverts and their school curriculum, it is an absolute disgrace.
Baa Humbug (23:02:02) :
They have a chance later this year to toss out this incompetent mob and replace them with another incompetent mob
So true, they all follow the same Tree Hugging BUllS**T.
TonyB (00:11:44) :
It has been pointed out before that the UK Government new about the Himalayan glaciers 2035 being wrong back in 2004 (if I remember correctly) after a team of british scientists looked in to it.
Try knew instead of new.
Rub a dub dub
Three men in a tub
These ads need a scrub
Rub a dub dub
Three men in a tub
Climate science need a scrub
Rub a dub dub
Three men in a tub
IPCC needs a scrub
Rub a dub dub
Three men in a tub
Millibands should be scrubb’d
This could be fun
I think Graham’s comment that this is Marxist propaganda devised by the suburban elite right on.
But we should consider ourselves fortunate indeed that our government cannot to rub two thoughts together to come up with any kind of real working plan.
The UK high commission in Canada for instance has been thinking outside the box after it found no one interested in their chatty and gossipy media office and staff. Media report they hired a former fund raiser from the cancer sector to promote climate change policy as a security policy the way they masked the closure of the commission’s passport office. But from what I can find on the web, Canadian media have not done any stories on the UK plan other than someone new was hired to replace the media office. How much money was wasted there, I wonder?
So Leake got it wrong yet again. This is not a surprise.
The ASA did not find any problem with the television adverts at all and did not find them misleading. The only fault they did find was in relation to two of the press adverts, and they said these two press adverts should be more tentative in regard to future climate, although the adverts were not exaggerated or misleading per se:
“Because, in a European context, there was a probability of greater than 90% for some events but a probability of greater than 50% for other events and because all statements about future climate conditions were based on modelled predictions, which the IPCC report itself stated still involved uncertainties in the magnitude and timing, as well as regional details, of predicted climate change, we concluded that the claim “Extreme weather events such as storms, floods and heatwaves will become more frequent and intense” in ad (b) and the claim “extreme weather conditions such as flooding, heat waves and storms will become more frequent and intense” in ad (c) should have been phrased more tentatively to reflect that. However, we considered that the imagery of UK flooding in ad (b) and of a drought in ad
(c) were not themselves (and particularly not in the context of a nursery rhyme “what if” presentations) exaggerated or misleading.”
Aww, they were only taking Schneider’s 1989 admonition to heart:
“We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
The balance was just a bit off, that’s all. As the S.S. Climatanic founders, the crew must keep busy rearranging the deck chairs.
Have you guys overlooked this rather curious shift in position (if not actual complete volte-face) concerning climate change by James Lovelock:
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/162506/How-carbon-gases-have-saved-us-from-a-new-ice-age-
“We’re just fiddling around. It is worth thinking that what we are doing in creating all these carbon emissions, far from being something frightful, is stopping the onset of a new ice age.”
As far as I know, this short article in the Express is the only primary report of his talk at the London Science Museum (a very curious fact in itself).
When the article was republished on Prison Planet, one of the resident warmist comment trolls seemed very discomforted by it and at first suggested that Lovelock’s apparent 180 degree turnabout in the AGW debate could only be the result of mischievous “cherry picking” of quotations from his talk. Later, however, he came back, smugly asserting that he had found proof that Lovelock had been misquoted in the form of a second account of a talk given by Lovelock at the Science Museum which did not tally in details with that in the Express. It then turned out, however, that either he didn’t notice, or thought that we wouldn’t, that this second account actually referred to a previous talk given by Lovelock in September 2009. This is the account of the previous talk:
http://www.prismmagazine.co.uk/2009/09/dont-save-the-world-save-yourself/
I hadn’t seen this article before (as far as I can ascertain using the WUWT search function, it seems that neither have you guys), and I was rather amused that the warmist troll had inadvertently brought to light this choice Lovelock quotation which would otherwise have been buried by history:
“The earth doesn’t behave like model predictions. I find it extraordinary that climate scientists put their names against such predictions (of the way the world will change) when there are such great uncertainties… What makes them persist with wrong climate models? Perhaps they had no option, given how much Government rely on certainties… They (climate models) are the battleships of climate change and the scientists have to sail in them.”
“Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.”
I never did understand the physics of that.
“Digsby (05:14:59) :
[Lovelock:]”They (climate models) are the battleships of climate change and the scientists have to sail in them.””
Ships of fools.
Baa Humbug (23:02:02) :
“As an Aussie, I’m thrilled whenever and however the poms get a beating….”
Careful now, Mr. Humbug! We do get some beating everywhere nowadays, dont we? We certainly do here in Norway. And I think there are some beatings going on down under as well.
Remember, all the tough Vikings lost their heads when Olav the Holy gave them the choice; Believe in God, or loose your heads! Now, its only the gullible left.
hehe.
They have taken control of all most all of the lines of information. And most all of the levers of power. And they have huge piles of taxpayers money for propaganda, and they still can not quite make the sale.
Huhrra for this band of skeptics, we’ve got them surrounded and on the run!
I guess you can’t fool all the people all the time.
Ric Werme:
What ever happened to the Science Museum poll?
In this instance I think Jonathan Leake wrote quite a balanced report about the ASA verdict. Good job!
We talked in a previous thread about the photoshopped flood pictures, and I think this now is a good example about what NOT to do (overstate the science) when trying to communicate scientific conclusions to the people.
I think I have to repeat again that I am very happy about Mr. Leake’s reporting. Among other things it shows me the importance of discarding my own useless preconceptions and the importance of being open for new ideas and thoughts (about people as well as issues).
Why would anyone take the Times of London as a source for accurate news reporting?
A stabbing in the back of the AGW machine;
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/162506/How-carbon-gases-have-saved-us-from-a-new-ice-age-
They are running!