Don't Call It A Religion

Except you're dog will die and you should feel guilty for using a car and living in your warm house.

IF you don't reduce your carbon footprint, then puppies will drown and bunny rabbits will die. And a terrifying, jagged-toothed monster with crazy hooked hands will descend from the clouds to eat you up.

Believe it or not, that is the message being delivered by the British government to children, in a L6 million ($10.7m) advertising campaign designed to scare the next generation witless about the alleged horrors of global warming.

Taking environmentalist propaganda to a new low, the TV ad shows a father reading a nightmarish bedtime story to his perturbed-looking young daughter.

He tells her of a land where the "weather is very, very strange". There are "awful heatwaves" and "terrible storms and floods". A cartoon bunny is shown crying as it starves on the dried, cracked earth, while elsewhere a puppy drowns in floodwaters.

Above it all, a sooty, blackened monster - CO2 made hideous flesh - surveys the horrors with a grotesque grin on its face.

And just in case the little girl, and the millions of children that the TV ad is aimed at, thinks this is merely a twisted fairytale, her father makes clear that it is reality.

It is the "horrible consequence", he says, of human beings using too much CO2, much of which comes from "everyday things like keeping houses warm and driving cars".

In short? Children who live in warm houses and who get lifts to school or football practice should feel guilty, because their evil antics are causing dogs to die and cute rabbits to go hungry.

Not surprisingly, the ad has caused a storm. Nearly 400 people have complained to Britain's Advertising Standards Authority. Some are disturbed by the ad's scientific illiteracy (how one gets from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's relatively sober reports about changing weather patterns to a cartoon dog drowning in a flooded city is anybody's guess). Others have slammed the government for knowingly and deliberately - and with taxypayers' money - scaring kids.

Total rational and scientific response to the situation. But it's evil religion like Christianity and Judaism that is hateful and fear inspiring. Good grief.