The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to analyze selected exemplars of the social marketing campaigns that have given global warming and climate change their cultural content, reframing them as public problems; second, to investigate how this content, once formed, is appropriated by private advertising for commercial ends; and third, to examine how the deployment of parody then inverts the original message to reinforce the values that the message had challenged. A sample of both visual and print media will be analyzed for evidence of these effects and to suggest a syntagmatic pattern that tracks the conversion of scientific messages of public concern into for-profit parody. Implications for the fate of risk messages in advanced commercial cultures will be considered.