Government climate change ad investigated after 350 complaints

Advertising Standards Authority to look into £6m campaign accused of scaremongering and misleading the public
Mark Sweney
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 21 October 2009 08.00 BST
The advertising regulator has launched an investigation into the government's climate change TV campaign after receiving more than 350 complaints accusing it of scaremongering and misleading the public.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change launched the £6m campaign, in which the government states for the first time that scientific evidence has confirmed that climate change is man-made, earlier this month.
The Advertising Standards Authority has received 357 complaints about the campaign.
Some of the complaints argued that there is no scientific evidence of climate change. Others claimed there was a division of scientific opinion on the issue and that the ad should therefore not have attributed global warming to human activity.
Another complaint was that the ad, which features a father telling his daughter a scary bedtime story about climate change in which a cartoon dog drowns, is inappropriate for children because it is "upsetting and scaremongering".
The ASA has said it intends to investigate the complaints and the assertions on which the campaign has been based.
The campaign marked a step change in the tone of the government's marketing around its Act on CO2 initiative. The DECC came out with the hard-hitting message after research showed that more than half of the UK public think climate change will have no effect on them.
Last week the DECC defended the campaign, and the science behind it, arguing that the goal is to "protect the next generation".
"It is consistent with government policy on the issue, which is informed by the latest science and assessments of peer-reviewed, scientific literature made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and other international bodies," said the energy and climate change minister Joan Ruddock.
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