My kids bring home their Weekly Readers and we discuss them at home. Very educational - along with what I can dig up from the internet. The one that hit home with them was the percentage of CO2 that we add to the atmosphere. It is something like .25% of the CO2 that goes into the atmosphere is manmade. I took 100 pennies, and took wite-out and made 1/4 of one of the pennies white. Dumped them onto the table and told them what was going on. And asked the question “how much do you think that white dot (in this mass of affects things”?
Then went into a disussion about how the CO2 levels LAG the temperature changes (cause and effect relationships).
The heck of it is, that there *are* a few good ideas amidst all of the crap. It *is* a good idea to conserve energy and water. It *is* (generally) a good idea to recycle. CFLs are excellent, for specific applications. Littering and pollution, in general, are bad.
The problem is with the terms in which these (good) ideas are couched. "If you don't recycle, we'll all be buried in garbage". "If you eat meat, you're eating baby chickens." "If your Mom and Dad drive a car, the earth will burn up from Global Warming." 6, 7, and 8 year olds (not all, but many) can't think critically enough to filter out the hyperbole.
I'm sure that the writers of this garbage know this very, very well. And use it. :-(