Climate Brainwashing of Children: a rough guide to spotting it happening.

Way back in 1992, Thomas Sowell wrote about brainwashing going on in the American education system, and he defined what he meant by that emotive term.  As I shall show below, his insights are relevant today when examining materials aimed at children about climate.  Extracts from Chapter 3:

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"A variety of programs used in classrooms across the country not only share the general goals of brainwashing - that is, changing fundamental attitudes, values, and belief by psychological-conditioning methods - but also use classic brainwashing techniques developed in totalitarian countries:

1. Emotional stress, shock, or de-sensitization, to break down both intellectual and emotional resistance

2. Isolation, whether physical or emotional, from familiar sources of emotional support in resistance

3. Cross-examining pre-existing values, often by manipulating peer pressure

4. Stripping the individual of normal defences, such as reserve, dignity, a sense of privacy, or the ability to decline to participate

5. Rewarding acceptance of the new attitudes, values, and beliefs - a reward which can be simply release from the pressures inflicted on those who resist, or may take other symbolic or tangible form."

I will illustrate these using an odious book for children called 'How to Turn Your Parents Green', first published in 2007.  Extracts from the book are shown in italics, and the techniques from Sowell's list are shown in bold:

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1. Emotional stress, shock, or de-sensitization, to break down both intellectual and emotional resistance

‘The weather’s gone weird.  The polar bears are anxious. Ghastly Global Warming is here.’  There are more examples of this sort of thing, but it will all too familiar to anyone with even a passing acquaintance such material. It is the bog-standard.

2. Isolation, whether physical or emotional, from familiar sources of emotional support in resistance

For children, these familiar sources are usually their parents.  Russell’s book sees them as stupid, selfish, ignorant people who are to be punished rather than seen as a source of advice or support:

‘…Only you can make the Groans behave because only you can make their lives a misery if they don’t.  We’ll help you draw up a Glorious Green Charter for them sign, and show you how to punish them – oh yes – if they don’t change their Grumbelicious ways.  Don’t be an Eco-Worrier, be an Eco-Warrior. And turn your parents Green.’

So, don't look to your parents for support, they are, after all quite wicked, and therefore you should 'make their lives a misery'.  

3. Cross-examining pre-existing values, often by manipulating peer pressure

‘The main aim of a Groan’s life is to exploit as much of the planet as possible before someone else does.  Even before Ghastly Global Warming, this philosophy was making the world a sadder place.  Fiendish Fertilizers and Pestilential Pesticides have killed off wild flowers, birds, bees and hedgehogs.  Our rivers and seas are horribly polluted.  Most of us live surrounded by the noise, dirt, and danger of traffic.  Groans think all this is fine and natural.  So what if the hedgehog becomes extinct? So what if climate change kills millions of people?  So what if  kids have nowhere to play because there are too many cars?  People die, they say with a shrug.  Species disappear.  Kids can play computer games.’

This is course is a parody of ‘pre-existing values’ but it serves his purpose.  Maybe a child's pre-existing values included holding their parents in great esteem, but here they are portrayed as heartless exploiters.  Maybe a child's pre-existing values included thinking the world was a source of wonder and delight, but here it is being made sadder, horribly polluted, noisy, dirty, and dangerous, with heartless adults ruining it.

4. Stripping the individual of normal defences, such as reserve, dignity, a sense of privacy, or the ability to decline to participate

Any child following the prescriptions of the book, would indeed be stripped of reserve, dignity and a sense of privacy.  They are being encouraged to be interfering busybodies in the lives of others, as well as of their own a according the author's inane prescriptions.  There is no option but to participate or else bad things will happen:

'Only you can do it, because only you can make the culprits change their ways.  Only you can nag, pester, bug, torment and punish the people who are merrily wrecking your world.'

‘Of course, it isn’t easy being Green.  We’re only human, after all. But if you follow Groan philosophy you’ll be unhappy, stressed, overweight and, quite possibly, under water.’

5. Rewarding acceptance of the new attitudes, values, and beliefs - a reward which can be simply release from the pressures inflicted on those who resist, or may take other symbolic or tangible form."

Mercifully, there seem to be no rewards on offer, but any children taken in by this trashy book are liable to get a sense of pressure to conform to its numerous prescriptions.  Of course, it is only a book and as such can scarcely offer tangible rewards.  They are more likely to come from organisations.  Eco-Schools anyone?  

Classical brainwashing such as recorded in the Korean war for example, was implemented while the victims were in the complete control of their tormentors in places such as prison-camps, and there over many months the techniques could be applied relentlessly every day.  Even then, there is evidence that it was rarely as successful as hoped.  But why should we tolerate even the attempt of trying some of these techniques on children?  Who wants them to be scared, alienated, and told what to think, what to believe, and what to do by strangers writing books, or by eco-campaigners visiting their schools, or by DVDs imposed on them by the previous government of the UK?   All for political ends, the pursuit of which through children involves first frightening them, then distancing them from their parents, dissing some of their society's great achievements such as affordable energy, and pushing the burden of reform, or even mere surival, on to their shoulders.  You can see why ruthless people want to try brainwashing others.  Fortunately for us all, it seems to be harder than they might think.

Parents check on your children, Governments check on your schools – brainwashing the young with climate scares needs to be resisted before even more harm is done to them.

CLIMATE CONTROL: Brainwashing in Schools is the title of a report published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).  

It was a huge privilege for me to work on this report with Andrew Montford, whose writings on climate matters I have long admired.  The GWPF in general, and Benny Peiser in particular, proved to be good to work with as well, as they provided critical reviews of our drafts over the past few months and generally encouraged our efforts.  I think of my blog here as mostly howling at the Moon, with some potentially worthwhile archiving of relevant information in the various reference pages I keep here.  But Andrew and Benny want a lot more than that.  Howling is not nearly good enough for them.  They want direct engagement with the mostly hostile or slumbering establishments of government, of scientific institutions, of all levels of education, of the mass media and political classes, and with the general public as well.  Without their drive, this report would not have appeared.  It was their idea, and I was pleased to help pursue it and help get it done.  I hope it will be widely read, and reacted to, and that much good may come of it.

Here is the text of the press release issued by the GWPF:

'London, 8 April: A new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation is calling for Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, to institute an official inquiry into the way environmentalism and in particular climate change are being taught in schools.

In the report, authors Andrew Montford and John Shade describe how environmentalism has come to permeate school curricula across the UK, featuring in an astonishing variety of subjects, from geography to religious education to modern languages. Passing examinations will now usually involve the ability to recite green mantras rather than understanding the subtle questions of science and economics involved.

The authors review in detail the climate change teaching materials currently used in British schools, with disturbing results. There is ample evidence of unscientific statements, manipulated graphs, and activist materials used in class and even found in textbooks.

The report also describes how activist teachers try to make children become the footsoldiers of the green movement, encouraging them to harass their schoolmates and pester their parents to bring about “behaviour change”.

The use of fear of climate change to alter children’s behaviour is also highlighted. This is undoubtedly having harmful consequences on children’s development and surveys indicate that fear of the future is widespread. The report quotes one child as saying:

“I worry about [global warming] because I don’t want to die.”

Author Andrew Montford says: “The brainwashing of our children for political ends is shameful. Those responsible for education in the UK need to take action and take it quickly” '

This blog is about to go through the 10,000 page visits a month mark.  Not much compared to the big-hitters, but a progress nevertheless that I am pleased with.  But of course it matters little unless further actions arise from it.  If you, gentle reader, find this report worthwhile and important, please consider passing it on to every school in your area, to every teacher you may know, to parent-teacher groups, to educational authorities, and so on.  The effective life of such a pamphlet is probably quite short, a few weeks or months at best perhaps, so the more use you can make of it, the better.  You can download the free pdf here.  You might get printed copies from the GWPF (I don’t yet know what the price of them would be).

Post Script

James Delingpole has just written about the report here: http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/04/08/Schoolchildren-terrorized-and-brainwashed-by-green-propaganda-says-damning-survey
Andrew had written about it earlier, and has attracted many favourable and informative comments: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2014/4/8/climate-control.html

Added 13 April 2014
The journalist Christopher Booker has referred to our report in a hard-hitting article today in the Sunday Telegraph.  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/10761597/No-A-level-for-climate-change-denier.html (the online version is accompanied with a picture with this caption: 'Schoolchildren are taught a one-sided Greenpeace-type view of the global warming scare'.  Unfortunately the photograph, a different one, in the print edition has this caption: 'Propaganda: the education system has been hijacked by global-warming believers'.  That is very seriously misleading.  For example, I think there is reasonably convincing evidence of some global warming in the 20thC, and should therefore be described as a 'global warming believer'.)
He includes reference to the Education Secretary's earlier response to the report, covered here: http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/04/08/Teachers-Acting-Illegally-Over-Climate-Change

Added 27 May 2014
A newly published study into the responses of young people in China to an online survey (response rate c. 19%), points to some impact of a government programme to modify indoctrination in Chinese schools (nowhere does the study refer to previous levels of indoctrination efforts) which was introduced in a staggered way thereby encouraging the authors in their pursuit of evidence of an effect.  In a nutshell, they found that the indoctrination had an identifiable effect in most areas, but not on one of the stated government objectives concerning the environment.  See: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/05/the-power-and-limits-of-indoctrination.php  (hat-tip Instapundit).  The report is available here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w20112  The authors conclude that 'Our findings
suggest that alongside other mechanisms of social and political control, political elites, indeed, can
shape students’ attitudes by choosing the content of the education system.'

A parent reacts to his children's 'flimsy', 'one-sided' education on global warming.

In 2011, a concerned parent, Seth Forman, was so disturbed by the superficial and one-sided education his children were getting in the United States about climate that he decided to assemble a set of bullet-points to explain 'Why I am a Global-Warming Skeptic (and You Should Be)'.  Notice that he does not dispute that global warming has occurred in the 20th Century - he is clearly using the term 'Global-Warming', as many do, as a shorthand for Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW).

I reproduce some of it here as an illustrative example of what parents can do without having a scientific background themselves.  Forman is a university professor in government and public policy, and a writer on various political and historical topics (http://www.mrformansplanet.com/index_files/Page358.htm).

He has clearly studied readily available materials, and prepared his own notes on the history of this particular eco-scare, then highlighting some of the controversies associated with it beginning with the Climategate revelations of 2009, before finishing with some 14 points to substantiate challenging the standard 'global warming narrative'.  He has the talents and skills of an established academic researcher and writer, but he is a layman as far as climate science is concerned.  But since that science has penetrated into public policy, and associated proselytising has penetrated into schools, he has sufficient cause to make his own examination of the issues involved.

Imagine what an organised group of parents could achieve, over say 12 months, if they set out to do the same.  Imagine how well they then be able to protect their own children, and perhaps others as well,  from inadequate teaching on climate matters, and from the numerous scare stories that have been promoted for decades now.

Extracts from his article: 
(bold typeface added by me in the first paragraph)

'I live in a wonderful suburban community on Long Island. My three children attend the excellent public schools in our district. As the two oldest children have made their way through middle school, though, I've been bothered by the rather flimsy instruction they've received on the subject of "global warming." Despite widespread divergence among scientists and reports of questionable scholarship in landmark global warming studies, my children (and, presumably, their classmates and millions of other young students) have been taught a standard, one-sided view of "global warming." Both my 14 year-old daughter and 11 year-old son have been shown Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth in sixth grade, but have been given nothing to suggest that some of the information in the movie is either controversial or misleading. So I've decided to put together this bullet point compendium of information discussing the current status of the "global warming" debate.

The History

1. Global warming is when near surface and water temperatures on earth rise. Scientists believe there are many factors involved in the earth's temperature changes, many of which are natural and have little or nothing to do with human activity (e.g. atmospheric processes like clouds and precipitation systems, the variability associated with phenomena like El Nino and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation). But an approximately 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in average temperatures over the last 100 years has put the focus of scientists and funding agencies on "greenhouse gases" (carbon dioxide, water vapor, nitrous oxide, and methane), some of which are emitted by humans. These gases can trap heat and light from the sun in the earth's atmosphere, which increases the temperature.

2. The claim that the earth is warming, that the warming is due to man's emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), and that continued emissions will lead to catastrophe gained major media attention during the hearings of then-U.S. Senator Al Gore's Committee on Science, Technology and Space in 1988. At those hearings Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies James Hansen claimed with" 99 percent certainty" that temperatures were rising due to a human-influenced "greenhouse effect."

...

[the article provides 4 more points under this heading]

The Controversy

1. In mid-November of 2009 there appeared a file on the internet containing thousands of emails and other documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain (CRU). The CRU supplied many of the authors for the IPCC reports. The file was quickly authenticated and provided unambiguous evidence that the CRU and associated research scientists throughout the world engaged in the unethical suppression of information and opposing viewpoints, data manipulation, and collusion. This event has become known as "climategate."

2. Climategate has mushroomed into a crisis affecting an entire scientific discipline. At the heart of this crisis is the "hockey stick" graph produced by Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State University, a co-conspirator in the leaked emails. After being given data by another scientist showing a mid-to-late 20^th century decline in temperatures, Mann responded in a September 22, 1999 email to the CRU, that it was a "problem and a potential distraction/detraction." So Mann deleted the embarrassing post-1960 portion of the data. The CRU's director Phil Jones applauded Mann's deceptions in an e-mail in which he crowed over "Mike's Nature trick," which also included a "method" of flat lining the medieval "warming period."

3. An independent study by a team of mathematicians was requested by the U.S. congress and headed by Dr. Edward J. Wegman. The Wegman study thoroughly discredited the Mann "hockey stick" research because of invalid use of statistical techniques and found that the conclusions by Mann could not be supported.

...

[there are 6 more points under this heading in the article]

Scientific Data That Challenges the Global Warming Narrative

1. CO2 is a benign gas essential to life, occurring in past eras at five times present levels. Changes in atmospheric CO2 do not correlate with human emissions of CO2, the latter being entirely trivial in the global balance. Oceans are the primary contributors of CO2 in the atmosphere.

2. According to Larry Bell, a professor at the University of Houston and the author of Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax, the abnormally high temperatures experienced on earth in the last century has been going on for 15,000 to 18,000 years, a life-friendly period known as an interglacial cycle, long before man-made inventions of agriculture, smokestacks, and SUVs.

3. Prof. Bell explains that temperatures are probably about the same today as during a "Roman Warm Period" slightly more than 2,000 years ago, and much warmer than the "Dark Ages" that followed. They are cooler than the "Medieval Warm Period" about 1,000 years ago when Eric the Red and his Icelandic Viking tribe settled on grasslands of Greenland's southwestern coast, and much warmer than about 400 years ago when the Northern Hemisphere plunged into depths of a "Little Ice Age."

4. According to Robert B. Laughlin, co-winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics: climate change over geologic time is something the earth has done "on its own without asking anyone's permission or explaining itself." Glacial episodes have occurred "at regular intervals of 100,000 years," always "a slow, steady cooling followed by abrupt warming back to conditions similar to today's."

5. The past century witnessed two distinct warming periods, one occurred from 1900-1945, and another from 1975-1998. About half of that total warming occurred before the mid-1940s. Recordsfrom land stations and ships indicate that the global mean surface temperature warmed by about 0.9 Fahrenheit since 1880*. These records indicate a near level trend in temperatures from 1880 to about 1910, a rise to 1945, a slight decline to about 1975, and a rise to 1998.

6. While CO2 levels have continued to rise, there hasn't been statistically significant warming since 1998.

...

[there are 8 more points under this heading in the article]'

*Comment. 0.9F looks to be on the low side.  The EPA site linked to by the author talks of modern warming at about 1.4F per century.  Perhaps the author meant to write 0.9C.  See: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/weather-climate/temperature.html

The article is linked to in my first paragraph, but here is the link again for convenience:

http://opinion-forum.com/index/2011/03/why-i%E2%80%99m-a-global-warming-skeptic-and-you-should-be/

Climate-Anxious Children - can parents, and caring teachers, help correct the harm done by climate alarm materials?

Pic: Brighter Futures

'Collectively, anxiety conditions are the most common mental disorders in children. Moreover, they often persist throughout life, causing significant distress and interfering significantly with social life and achievement both during the child’s formative years and later in adulthood. '

The quote is from a mental health researcher, Kathy Griffiths


There is considerable evidence that many children suffer from anxiety about climate change.  The plausibility of that seems obvious given the dreadful materials, in books , websites, and curricula aimed at children, and in some cases aimed at scaring them into being political activists.

Who will help children cope with climate alarmism, and help protect them from those who, wittingly or otherwise, are acting as recruiting sergeants?  

The best candidates are surely their parents, aided whenever possible by sympathetic teachers.

The pioneering book Facts, Not Fear by Sanera and Shaw, shows how easy it is to de-fuse so many eco-alarms, not just the climate one.  Their approach is simply one of helping children see the bigger picture, and not the narrow-minded, highly-selective view pushed at them by propagandists.





I stumbled across an illustration of this today, on the blog of a teacher in London.  His post is entitled

How Not to Teach Climate Change

Here is an extract from it (I have added the emboldening):

'Last week I substitute-taught a Year 5 class that was learning about climate change. One of our pre-planned activities was to continue making posters about “good gases and bad gases”. I immediately noted that every student had slapped carbon dioxide (CO2) in the “bad gas” column.

I quizzed the class, and discovered that they had been taught the following line of thinking.

1. Carbon dioxide is a harmful and poisonous gas.
2. Nearly all daily human activity – turning on lights, jumping in a car, using an electrical device etc. – creates carbon dioxide.

They had no idea of the following:

Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is a natural constituent of the atmosphere… 

Carbon dioxide is by far the most important (organic compound) for the sustainability of the biosphere (the whole of life on Earth).

Without CO2 the life of photosynthetic organisms and animals would be impossible, given that CO2 provides the basis for the synthesis of organic compounds that provide nutrients for plants and animals. Biology Cabinet

Just think about that for a second.

Imagine you’re a naive child, and your teacher tells you that your every daily action creates poisonous gases that destroy the planet.

I was shocked, and quickly set the record straight by informing them that CO2 is actually essential for life on earth; it feeds plants, and it is a crucial ingredient in their, and in every other living creature’s, bodies. I added that scientists think it may be warming up our planet, but they’re still not 100% sure.* These facts came much to their surprise and relief. '

[Hat-tip: it was from his post that I obtained the link to the mental healthcare quote which I used earlier]

What to do about it?

See how easy it was!  Here is a man who has compassion for the children, and enough knowledge to realise very quickly what a dangerously limited view they have of CO2.  A few simple facts seem to have helped dispel at least some of their fear.  Well done that man!  

This is one of the kinds of intervention suggested by Sanera and Shaw, and it seems to me that it could be accomplished by parents as well.  But first, those parents need to get themselves reasonably well-informed.  They will need to look beyond biased-outlets such as the BBC or most of the rest of the mass media, such as the UK's Guardian or Independent newspapers.  

A discussion-group that met regularly could invite expert speakers, and do online research to gather scientific results and informed opinions on any issue.  Has your child been told that a polar bear will die unless you switch off your lights and stop using the car so often?  It won't take long to discover that the bears are doing quite well, and that nothing extraordinary has been happening to Arctic sea ice, which has long been known to be highly variable.  Or that rising seas will swamp their coastal cities?  A quick check should show that there has been no great acceleration of the slow rise in sea levels which has been going on long before our CO2 could have had an impact, and that the plausible projected levels this century will readily be coped with. It is not hard, but some persistence is required to sift through the torrents of alarmist-conformism that will be encountered.

Occam’s Broom and the stink of ‘97% of Climate Scientists’

‘The molecular biologist Sidney Brenner recently invented a delicious play on Occam’s Razor, introducing the new term Occam’s Broom, to describe the process in which inconvenient facts are whisked under the rug by intellectually dishonest champions of one theory or another…The practice is particularly insidious when used by propagandists who direct their efforts at the lay public …their carefully crafted accounts can be quite convincing simply because the lay reader can’t see what isn’t there.’                            Source: Daniel C Dennett

This Broom is so widely used in climate-scare propagandising that it could be the basis of a book about that dark art.  I want to focus on just one of the displays of it and that is the mis-use of the statistic '97% of climate scientists'.  To mix the metaphor, here is a source of one foul smell that no amount of brushing can remove.  It is the smell of deliberate deceit repeated over and over again.

As we shall see, the 97% figure, or ones like it, come from very unsatisfactory sources, and are not at all what they are sometimes made out to be, often by innuendo, insinuation, or juxtaposition.  The deceit occurs when the audience is encouraged to conclude that the 97% agree that there is a dreadful crisis associated with our CO2 emissions, and that draconic interventions by governments are all but immediately required if we are to survive the imminent catastrophe. 

In reality, the figure generally means, where meaning can be found in the studies which have produced it, that a non-random selection of people or papers contains around 97% of items supporting the twin notions that we affect climate with our CO2 emissions and that there has been overall global warming during the 20th century to which we have contributed.  

Note there is nothing intrinsically alarming about either of these notions because they are unquantified.  Some scientists believe for example that our impacts on the climate system have been too small to detect so far using global measures such as mean temperature, and may well remain so even if ambient CO2 levels continue to increase this century.

Here is a prominent example of 'propagandists directing their efforts at the lay public', published in the Wall Street Journal in 2012:

'The world is heating up and humans are primarily responsible. Impacts are already apparent and will increase. Reducing future impacts will require significant reductions in emissions of heat-trapping gases.  Research shows that more than 97% of scientists actively publishing in the field agree that climate change is real and human caused.  It would be an act of recklessness for any political leader to disregard the weight of evidence and ignore the enormous risks that climate change clearly poses’

I have put the key phrase in bold to help it stand out.  Notice the tone of the surrounding text.  This is the insidious part.  It would seem, would it not, that this 97% of scientists hold that 'humans are primarily responsible', that 'significant reductions of heat-trapping gases' are required, and it would be 'reckless' to 'ignore the enormous risks'.  That is crisis talk.  We do not know how many scientists, or what proportion of them, believe there is such a crisis.  The 97% is not that figure, nor indeed has it been shown to be the proportion who agree that all of climate change is human caused (another insidious insinuation in the above quote).

Here is a more straightforward usage on a NASA site, one which might well be widely referenced by schoolteachers, pupils, and the authors of school materials:

'Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities.'

We also have this notorious tweet from the office of the US President, Barack Obama in 2013:

‘Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.’

Anthony Watts described the tweet quite simply as a lie: 

‘Here’s the genesis of the lie. When you take a result of 32.6% of all papers that accept AGW, ignoring the 66% that don’t, and twist that into 97%, excluding any mention of that original value in your media reports, there’s nothing else to call it – a lie of presidential proportions.’

Lifting the Rug

The notion of an overwhelming consensus in support of alarm is generally traced to one or other of 4 studies:

Oreskes (2004)  

Doran and Zimmerman (2009) 

Anderegg et al (2010) 

Cook et al (2013) 

All 4 have been severely criticised.  
For example, re the Oreskes study of a set of papers she located from the years 1993 to 2003, the theoretical physicist Lubos Motl was not impressed and supports Benny Peiser's view: 'In light of the data presented above (evidence that can be easily verified), Science should withdraw Oreskes' study and its results in order to prevent any further damage to the integrity of science.'  A medical researcher, Klaus-Martin Schulte also took a critical look at Oreskes' methods, and using them on more recent papers, published between 2004 and 2007 he found:  'Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category  (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis.  This is no "consensus."'

Doran and Zimmerman's work was essentially a student project given an elevation and prominence which it did not, to put it mildly, deserve. In an attempted census of some 10,000 targets, only about 3,000 responded, and of these a subset of about 77 was singled-out to produce the 97% statistic since 75 of them agreed with quite innocuous, but carelessly worded, statements about climate to the effect that it has been warming recently, and humans could have contributed to it in a 'significant' way.  WUWT has relevant links.

Anderegg at al has been described as 'having so many defects it should never have been published' (see source of this observation and other criticisms in this post by Tom Harris.  Roger Pielke Sr. noted that the paper illustrates 'how far we have gone from the appropriate scientific process.'

Cook et al has also been shredded by informed commentators, appalled at what they found in it.  It actually contradicts what it is purporting to show, as noted by Brandon Shollenberger: 'This study done by John Cook and others, praised by the President of the United States, found more scientific publications whose abstracts reject global warming than say humans are primarily to blame for it.  The “consensus” they’re promoting says it is more likely humans have a negligible impact on the planet’s warming than a large one.’    Marcel Crok was a little harsher, he provides chapter and verse to show why the Cook et al paper is both 'meaningless and misleading'.  Christopher Monckton finds that 0.3% 'consensus' is more convincing than 97% using the Cook et al data, and he also has useful, and critical, insights on the other source papers.*

Andrew Montford has written a brief and very accessible overview of some of the shortcoming of the last three papers.  He points out that their  ' results add up to little more than “carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas” and “mankind affects the climate.” These are propositions that almost everybody in the climate debate accepts; ‘  He has also published a trenchant analysis of the Cook et al paper ins this GWPF note.  In it he quotes Mike Hulme, by no means a climate sceptic, writing 'The [Cook et al.] article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed.   It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country that the energy minister should cite it.'

Let me end with the words of commentator Barry Woods on the WUWT blog:: '.. I would like to put aside any criticism of the methodology or conclusions the scientists behind the Doran, Anderegg or any other similar paper make, and reserve my strongest criticism to others that misrepresent them, or go much further than the conclusions. My strongest criticism is not for those politicians, environmentalists, journalists or scientists, that use the soundbite of ’97% of scientists’ in complete ignorance of its source, or do not check the citation for themselves ...No, I reserve my strongest criticism for those activist scientist that know full well the source of the ’97% of scientists’ soundbite and use it anyway, ... and then use it to imply that there is some consensus of future dangerous or catastrophic risk, or that certain policies that must be taken, because of this consensus.'

I think Barry is right.  Irresponsible people can deploy Occam's Broom on this as much as they like, but the rotten smell of their '97%' insinuations will not go away.  Their rug has been lifted on that one.  In due course, I hope this particular deception will be removed from materials aimed at schoolchildren.  In the meantime, teachers and pupils alike can express their disdain by holding their noses as and when they come across it.

* Note added 26 March 2014. I forgot to mention the important study published by Legates in 2013 about the Cook et al. nonsense.  A useful report on it can be found here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/03/cooks-97-consensus-disproven-by-a-new-paper-showing-major-math-errors/  Extract: 'Dr Legates said: “It is astonishing that any journal could have published a paper claiming a 97% climate consensus when on the authors’ own analysis the true consensus was well below 1%." '  

Note added 14 March 2017.  The corrupted-by-campaigners organisation NASA has long had a 97% claim up on its website.  Here is a report on just how shonky their reference to support it is: https://realclimatescience.com/2017/03/massive-fraud-at-nasa-climate/
'If you actually click on the reference, you quickly realize that the claim is fraudulent. '

Further Reading

(1) The NIPCC 2013 report 'Climate Change Reconsidered II' is a good source of counter-arguments linked to the scientific literature and taking a contrary position to that promoted by the IPCC leadership.

(2) The Popular Technology website has compiled a list of over 1,350 'peer-reviewed papers supporting skeptic arguments against ACC/AGW alarm'. 

(3) For a very recent exposure of Occam's Broom being deployed by IPCC scientists see :

IPCC Scientists Knew Data and Science Inadequacies Contradicted Certainties Presented to Media, Public and Politicians, But Remained Silent

Note added 10 May 2014  A further refutation of the Cook-junk is about to be published as a journal note.  More details here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/10/john-cooks-97-consensus-claim-is-about-to-go-pear-shaped/ )

Note added 4 Sep 2014  More devastating analysis of the Cook et junk:
'This all tells us:

1) They blatantly, cavalierly, and repeatedly violated the methods they claimed in their paper, methods that are crucial to the validity of a subjective rater study – maintaining blindness to the authors of papers they rated, and conducting their ratings independently. This destroyed the validity of an already invalid study – more coherently, it destroyed the validity of the study if we assumed it was valid to begin with.

2) These people were not in a scientific mood. They had none of the integrity, neutrality, and discipline to be subjective raters on such a study. We could've confidently predicted this outcome in advance, given that they're political activists on the subject of their ratings, had an enormous conflict of interest with respect to the results, and the design appointed them subjective raters of written work, placing them in the position to deliver the results they so fervently sought. Just that fact – the basic design – invalidates the study and makes it unpublishable. We can't go around being this dumb. This is ridiculous, letting this kind of junk into a scientific journal. It's a disgrace.'

 http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/cooking-stove-use-housing-associations-white-males-and-the-97

Note added 16 Sep 2014    Andrew Montford has written a report on the Cook et al.travesty - one of the sources of '97%'.  He concludes the consensus they produce is 'virtually meaningless'.  

http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2014/09/Warming-consensus-and-it-critics1.pdf

Note added 21 Dec 2014  Popular Technology have listed their top 97 articles refuting the '97% consensus':  http://www.populartechnology.net/2014/12/97-articles-refuting-97-consensus.html  They note, 'The following is a list of 97 articles that refute Cook's (poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed) 97% "consensus" study. The fact that anyone continues to bring up such soundly debunked nonsense like Cook's study is an embarrassment to science.'

Note added 18 May 2015.  The '97%' nonsense is still being used, presumably because the propaganda benefits are many.  Here Ross McKitrick shows once again how shoddy it is: http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/climate-change-consensus-among-the-misinformed-is-not-worth-much

Note added 13 August 2015.
Here is a 2014 article by James Delingpole which provides some useful insights into the tawdry methods and motivation of Cook et al:  http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/09/08/obama-s-97-percent-climate-consensus-debunked-demolished-staked-through-the-heart/

Here is an August 2015 post by the MEP Roger Helmer (hat tip Climate Science) noting that a somewhat more respectable (but imho still very unsatisfactory) survey in which less than 50% of respondents took the IPCC party line:  https://rogerhelmermep.wordpress.com/2015/08/02/new-study-destroys-that-97-of-scientists-claim-or-not-as-the-case-may-be/
Details of that survey can be obtained here: http://www.pbl.nl/en/publications/climate-science-survey-questions-and-responses

Note added 23 March 2016.
Anthony Watts: 'I don’t like to use the word “fraud”, and I can’t recall if I’ve ever used it in a title. In this case it is warranted. Brandon Shollenberger writes of a new book, The Climate Wars: How the Consensus is Enforced, that proves without a doubt that John Cook and his “Skeptical Science” team are nothing but a gang of “say anything” activists, and that the much repeated “97% consensus” is indeed nothing more than a manufactured outcome.'

See: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/03/12/the-cook-97-consensus-paper-exposed-by-new-book-for-the-fraud-that-it-really-is/

Note added 23 October 2018.
Three cheers!  The President of the USA speaks sense on climate, and in particular recognises there is substantial disagreement on the topic amongst scientists: 
See: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/23/president-trump-thinks-scientists-are-split-on-climate-change-hes-right-dana-nuccitelli-is-wrong/

Note added 19 February 2019.
They are still at it re this 97% nonsense.  It is yet more evidence that alarmists don't read, don't think, don't care about anything other than their own gurus and sacred slogans!  But this piece also includes a useful rejoinder:
http://www.cfact.org/2019/02/17/32717/

Note added 25 Sep 2019
Here is a good, and still highly relevant, essay on the 97% mythology:
https://www.tfp.org/the-cynical-myth-of-a-global-warming-consensus/
It is quite astonishing how this nonsensical claim is still widely used by the zealots - like crazed fanatics, they ignore reality as they rant and rave at us.

Note added 22 May 2024  

A video made in 2019 provides a very accessible demolition of the shoddy 97% claim:

Hat-tip:  https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/05/19/john-robsons-history-of-the-97-scam/