In what we would call public service announcements in the States, the Department of Energy and Climate Change actually used nursery rhymes to scare people into thinking England was in imminent peril as a result of Nobel Laureate Al Gore's favorite money-making theory.
As reported by BBC.com Wednesday:
Two posters juxtaposed adapted extracts from popular nursery rhymes with text that warned about the dangers of global warning.
One of the banned adverts read: "Rub a dub, three men in a tub, a necessary course of action due to flash flooding caused by climate change."
And a second said Jack and Jill could not fetch a pail of water because extreme weather due to climate change had caused a drought.
The ASA upheld complaints against these two advertisements, saying a claim that "extreme weather events would become more frequent and intense" should have been phrased more tentatively.
It noted that predictions about the potential impact of global warming made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "involved uncertainties" that had not been reflected in the adverts.
The advertising watchdog said the text accompanying the rhymes should have used more tentative language in both instances.
So, in 2007, a British judge ruled that there were eleven inaccuracies in Gore's schlockumentary "An Inconvenient Truth" and ordered that if this film was shown in public schools, it had to include a disclaimer about its political nature as well as these errors.
Now, a British agency is overseeing PSAs to make sure the government isn't exaggerating the dangers of this as yet unproven theory.
And we Americans chauvinistically view ourselves as being so far ahead of our friends across the Pond.
As it becomes more and more clear just how many so-called facts coming from the global warming crowd and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are either totally false or have been grossly exaggerated, maybe agencies that monitor television commercials here should be just as diligent in assessing accuracy.
Or is that asking too much?
