Climate myth-buster John Cook is recognised as a top science communicator. "What this research showed was that if you do it in the wrong way, if you put the emphasis on the myth, you risk reinforcing the myth. "When I compared the bad examples in the research to how I was actually doing it, they were both the same." Mr Cook switched his focus, began learning everything he could about the psychology of myth busting and eventually started his own studies. His 2013 analysis was one of the key pieces of research used to quote the figure that 97 per cent of climate scientists agreed climate change was happening and caused by humans.

John Cook at a scientific conference in San Francisco explaining a 2013 consensus paper to Naomi Oreskes, who published a seminal work on scientific consensus. More recently, he found simply presenting people with that figure had a significant positive effect on people's likelihood to accept anthropomorphic climate change. This week, the American National Center for Science Education gave Mr Cook its annual Friend of the Planet award, for outstanding work to advance the centre's goals. UQ's Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute shared the simplest way to combat four common climate change myths with Fairfax Media. MYTH BUSTED: There's no scientific consensus on climate change

Actually, Mr Cook's and many others' research showed there was a 97 per cent consensus among qualified climate scientists that man-made climate change was real. "This argument has been presented for decades, dating back to the 1990s or possibly the 1980s. "The reality is that there's 97 per cent agreement among climate scientists that human are causing global warming. The technique that is often used to cast doubt on this figure is to use fake experts, use people who have the impression of scientific expertise but don't actually publish peer-reviewed research. "There's a petition with 31,000 people with science degrees who don't believe in human-caused global warming and this petition is used to cast doubt on the consensus but it's 31,000 almost all fake experts." MYTH BUSTED: Climate has changed in the past. What's happening now must be natural as well

This argument uses a logical fallacy known as a non sequitur, or jumping to conclusions. "Just imagine if you walked into a room and you found a dead body with a knife sticking out of it's back and you argued 'well, humans have been dying of natural natural causes for thousands of years, so therefore, this person must have died of natural causes as well.' "The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise and that's pretty much the same argument that's used in this natural climate change argument. "When we look at climate change now, what we see are many fingerprints or patterns in the climate change that match human activity. "Many lines of evidence that humans are causing global warming."

MYTH BUSTED: The sun is causing global warming "The argument is really 'look up in the sky, you see this big ball of fire and think, look how big the sun is, how can we compare to that?' It's a very anecdotal argument. "But the fact here is that over the last 30 years of global warming, sun and climate have been going in opposite directions. "Solar activity has actually been going down for the last few decades while we've been experiencing this warming and so that really rules out the sun as a cause of global warming, the fact that it's actually had a cooling influence. On top of that we also have all these human fingerprints." MYTH BUSTED: Global warming stopped about two decades ago

"The fact here is that over the last few decades our planet has been building up heat at a rate of four atomic bombs per second. "So every second four atomic bombs worth of heat, or 250 trillion joules of energy, is building up in our climate system, day, night for the last 20-odd years. "The technique used to distort the reality of global warming is again, cherry-picking, just looking at small bits of data and ignoring the bigger picture. "They'll just cherry-pick small periods of a temperature record and say 'hey look, over a very small period, temperature isn't going up very much' but it's ignoring the bigger picture and it's ignoring looking at our climate system as a whole, all the heat building up in our system."