HBO's John Oliver on Public Skepticism of Global Warming: 'Who Gives a S–t?'

On HBO’s Sunday broadcast of “Last Week Tonight,” host John Oliver took on President Barack Obama’s latest pivot to the so-called climate change issue.

Oliver, who aligned himself with the global warming alarmist side of the debate, showed he was dismissive of public opinion in that a Gallup poll from April found that one in four Americans were skeptical of the theory of anthropogenic climate change.

“Who gives a s–t?” Oliver said. “That doesn’t matter. You don’t need people’s opinion on a fact. You might as well have a poll asking, ‘Which number is bigger, 15 or 5?’ Or, ‘Do owls exist?’ Or, ‘Are there hats?’ The debate on climate change ought not to be whether or not it exists. It is what we should do about. There is a mountain of research on this topic. Global temperatures are rising. Heat waves are becoming more common. Sea surface temperatures are also rising. Glaciers are melting. And of course, no climate report is complete without the obligatory photo of a polar bear balancing on a piece of ice.”

“The only accurate way to report that one out of four Americans are skeptical of global warming is to say, ‘One in four Americans are wrong about something,’” he continued. “Because a survey of thousands of positions of scientific papers either took a position on climate change found that 97 percent endorsed the positions that humans are causing global warming.”

Oliver went on to blame public opinion on how the issue debated on TV, which is argued it is often portrayed as a 50-50 proposition, with Bill Nye “the Science Guy” often taking up the affirmative side of anthropogenic global warming.

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