I have submitted this to ABC Fact Checkers.

Yesterday on the ABC Drum John Hewson said 97% of Climate scientists are in agreement. We continuously hear politicians, journalists and activists refer to this 97% consensus among variously either scientists or climate scientists. In the telling it changes from the consensus being that they agree that humans are causing global warming or climate change, or that they are causing dangerous climate change, or that they agree we need to drastically reduce CO2 emissions. Now of course it can’t be all of those things and I think it is about time someone set the record straight. Even President Obama is said to have tweeted “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”

He tweeted that after the publication of this paper: Cook, J., Nuccitelli, D., Green, S. A., Richardson, M., Winkler, B., Painting, R., et al. (2013). ‘Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scienti?c literature.’ Environmental Research Letters, 8, 024024.

However this appears to have been totally refuted with the following peer-reviewed paper by reputable people published in a reputable peer reviewed journal:

The 97.1 % consensus claimed by Cook et al. (2013) turns out upon inspection to be not 97.1 % but 0.3 %. Their claim of 97.1 % consensus, therefore, is arguably one of the greatest items of misinformation that has been circulated on either side of the climate debate.

Here is an abbreviated version of the press release summarising the above paper.