There is a strong degree of agreement in climate sciences on the question regarding anthropogenic climate change. Anderegg et al. (2010) suggested that 97–98 % of the actively publishing climate researchers support the main conclusions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (IPCC 2007). Cook et al. (2013) reviewed nearly 12,000 climate abstracts and received 1200 self-ratings from the authors of climate science publications. Based on both the abstracts and the self-ratings, they found a 97 % consensus in the relevant peer-reviewed climate science literature on humans causing global warming. This consensus was also noted by Oreskes (2004), yet a notable proportion of Americans doubt the anthropogenic cause behind the recent climate change (Leiserowitz et al. 2013; Doran and Zimmerman 2009). There is a lack of public awareness about the level of scientific agreement underpinning the view on anthropogenic global warming. Doran and Zimmerman (2009) reported that 52 % of Americans think that most climate scientists agree that the Earth has been warming in recent years, and 47 % think that climate scientists agree that human activities are a major cause of that warming. Theissen (2011) argued that many US undergraduate students are confused by a number of myths concerning climate change, propagated by blogs and media, and a similar “consensus gap” exists in other countries, for example Australia (Leviston et al. 2012; Lewandowsky et al. 2013).

This gap of perception can be traced in part to a small number of contrarian papers that have appeared in the scientific literature and are often cited in the public discourse disputing the causes of climate change (Rahmstorf 2012). The message from these has been picked up by the media, a number of organizations, and blogs and has been turned into videos. For instance, a claim that the atmospheric greenhouse effect is “saturated” by a Canadian organization called “Friends of Science” is supported by one contrarian paper (Miskolczi 2010). A handful of papers (Shaviv 2002; Svensmark 1998; Friis-Christensen and Lassen 1991; Marsh and Svensmark 2000) have provided a basis for videos with titles such as “The Global Warming Swindle” and “The cloud mystery.” These have targeted the lay public, who have been left with the impression that greenhouse gases (GHGs) play a minor role in global warming and that the recent warming has been caused by changes in the sun. In the USA, the “Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change” (NIPCC) report (Idso et al. 2009; NIPCC 2013), the “Science & Environmental Policy Project” (SEPP), and the Heartland Institute have played an active role in the public discourse, providing a platform for the public dissemination of papers at variance with the notion of anthropogenic climate change. In Norway, there have been campaigns led by an organization called “Klimarealistene” which dismisses the conclusions drawn by the IPCC. This Norwegian organization has fed the conclusions from contrarian papers into schools through leaflets sent to the headmasters (Newt and Wiik 2012), following an example set by the Heartland Institute. They have also used a popular website (www.forskning.no) to promote such controversial papers targeting schools and the general public.

Misrepresentation of the climate sciences is a concern, and Somerville and Hassol (2011) have called for the badly needed voice of rational scientists in modern society. There have been attempts in the scientific literature to correct some misconceptions, such as a myth regarding an alleged recent “slow-down” in global warming, a so-called hiatus. Easterling and Wehner (2009) showed that natural variations give rise to reduced or even negative temperature trends over brief periods; however, this is due to stochastic fluctuations about an underlying warming trend (Foster and Rahmstorf 2011). Balmaseda et al. (2013) suggested that changes in the winds have resulted in a recent heat accumulation in the deep sea that has masked the surface warming and that the ocean heat content shows a steady increase. Examples of setting the record straight include both scientific papers (Legras et al. 2010; Masuda et al. 2006) and blogs such as Climate Dialogue (Vasileiadou 2013), SkepticalScience.com, and RealClimate.org (Rapley 2012).

The current situation for the climate sciences has been described as “a struggle about the truth of the state of climate” (Romm 2010), and a number of books even claim that climate science myths have been introduced to society in a distorted way, causing more confusion than enlightenment (Oreskes and Conway 2008; Gelbspan 1997; Hoggan et al. 2009; Mooney 2006). Unjustified claims and harsh debates are not new (Sherwood 2011); history shows that they have been part of the scientific discourse for a long time. There are few papers in the literature that provide comprehensive analyses of several contrarian papers, and hence, a pattern of similarities between these may go unnoticed. Writing collections of replications of past papers is not the norm, but it is difficult to get published in journals with a set of expected formats or because of high likelihood that one reviewer does not like the implications or conclusions. Some journals do not even allow comments.

An interesting question is whether mistakes are random events or if a number of papers share common flaws of logic or methodology. We expect that scientific papers in general form networks by citing one another, and it is interesting to ask whether conclusions drawn in flawed papers are independent of each other or if errors propagate through further citation. To address this question, we need to identify errors through replicating previous work, following the line from the original information source, via analysis, to the interpretation of the results and the final conclusions, testing methods and assumptions. The objective of this paper is to present an approach to documenting and learning from mistakes. Errors and mistakes are often considered to be an essential ingredient of the learning process (Bedford 2010; Bedford and Cook 2013), creating potential learning material. The supporting material (SM) contains a number of case studies with examples of scrutiny and replication, providing an in-depth analysis of each paper (Benestad 2014a). Accompanying open-source software (also part of the SM) includes the source code for all of the analyses (Benestad 2014b, c). An important point is that this software too is open to scrutiny by other experts and, in the case of replication, represents the “hard facts” on which the SM and this paper are based.