Two advertisements commissioned by Great Britain’s Energy Secretary, Ed Milband,  have been banned by Britain’s Advertisement Standards Authority (ASA) for exaggerating the potential harm from global warming. According to a report in the Times of London “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and Climate Change (DECC) that they should not be published again.” The ASA received received 939 complaints about the ads, more than for any other ad last year. Interestingly, the ASA used the IPCC report in determining that the ads were overly alarmist. In other words, the ads were so over the top that that they couldn’t even be justified by the language of the IPCC. According to the Times, the ASA “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.”