Link to video of John Oliver's "balanced" 97% to 3% debate.
John Oliver tells us that NASA and 97 percent of scientists all agree climate change is real, here now, and that human activity is the driving force behind climate disruption. On his new HBO show, Last Week Tonight, John Oliver dramatized this 97% to 3% ratio demonstrating just how senseless this so-called debate really is. The Guardian describes John Oliver's viral video: the best climate debate you'll ever see, in an article written by John Abraham and Dana Nuccitelli.
Oliver shows what the debate should look like by having 96 additional scientists join Bill Nye, the Science Guy, on stage to debate 3 climate-change deniers, instead the kind of debates we usually see, which imply a false equivalence of "here's 1 scientist and here 1 science-denier, 50% - 50% balance, giving far too much sense of credibility to climate-change deniers.
Chris Mooney & Indre Viskontas who interviewed John Oliver on their Podcast, Inquiring Minds Podcast, say:
"I feel like they said in 4 minutes something I've been saying for 10 years with like tens or hundreds of thousands of words; what they said was that there's no debate over global warming, so to have these 'balanced' 1-on-1 TV debates is just preposterous."
The Guardian reviews John Oliver's HBO, shown in the embedded above.
Humanity's response to global warming has so far been a massive risk-management failure, or as Oliver put it, "we've all proven that we cannot be trusted with the future tense." ... Public skepticism about global warming is irrelevant. As Neil deGrasse Tyson says, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."
"The stridency, and the intense comfort with a lack of scientific information, is ludicrous—it's objectively ludicrous. So I'm attracted to going to wherever the biggest hypocrisy is, and there feels like there's some good mining to be done regarding environmental issues…This world will be a complete ball of fire before it stops being funny." [...]
The BBC for example has ignored viewer criticisms of its climate reporting false balance, and also its own review of impartiality and accuracy in its science reporting. CNN has continued to host these 1-on-1 climate 'debates' despite two prominent CNN hosts condemning its false balance.
The BBC closes by hoping that John Oliver's mockery will "dissuade" media organizations from portraying this false balance.
Shouldn't we go beyond "hope" and more aggressively challenge media misrepresentation of the credibility of this group of goofballs?
Is it also not time for us to stop giving so much attention to science deniers? We need go focus our attention of what we need to do next. So it feels like our nation is ready for the Obama administration's announcement next Monday, of what our nation's new emission's regulations for coal fired electricity plants described by Meteor Blades in If EPA's CO2 emissions rule being announced June 2 can overcome foes, it could make a big difference.
My feeling is that this month we crossed over a significant hump point this month in the debate over global warming and climate change. From this point forward I expect public opinions polls will move quickly and sharply in our direction. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fl) received a surprising taste of the new "environment" and reception climate-change and science deniers can expect to get from now on - open mockery and derision. Their ability to block action to move forward will diminish and come at an escalating cost.
[Update] As this "cost' of public stupidiy rises, we will see a sudden massive retreat of cowardly politicians fleeing from what used to be an easy publicity grab of professing "climate denial" as I illustrate in Rick Scott's evolves to 'climate change-mutism,' refusing to take a position, he used to be a denier.
Now politicians fear the withering shredding from the science-affirmation crowd more than they do mumbles from the tea-party base. Watch and see how fast polls and "poles' change now. It will almost as if just by watching a video like this and hearing an entire audience derisive ridicule climate-denialism, Rick Scott suddenly remembers a whole 4 years of high school science classes.
A year from now i will be like a year after Watergate when we couldn't find anyone who remembered having voted for Nixon. By next year every one you talk to will laugh the old days when "those" science deniers used to be so silly, dope used to be illegal, and those people in the backwards place used to have prejudice against women, people of color, and the GLBT. ... OK, maybe that will take two years, or more, but mark my words we have seen a turning point.
7:43 PM PT: Changed "fringe goofballs" to "goofball climate-change-deniers" based on feedback from Gooserock, (see his comment below which I agree with.) So while the 3% is a fringe group in the scientific community, they represent a well financed major obstacle for us in the political system.