In context, that John Oliver debate segment was dumb. They took a perfectly reasonable Gallop poll result - that 1 in 4 Americans think the threat of climate ch

In context, that John Oliver debate segment was dumb. They took a perfectly reasonable Gallop poll result - that 1 in 4 Americans think the threat of climate change has been exaggerated - and rhetorically pretended the claim being made was that climate change "isn't real" or "doesn't exist". But establishing that a threat exists is quite a lot different from establishing whether it's being overestimated or underestimated in the media, so the whole segment was a non sequitur - it didn't respond in any way at all to the news article it was allegedly answering. My guess is that they had Bill Nye, wanted to do this gag, couldn't come up with any valid reason to do it based on any actual news stories, then said "heck, let's do it anyway; maybe nobody will notice!" (As a side note, if you look into how the claims of "97% agreement" were determined, you'll find that most "skeptics" would also be in the 97%. It's pure propaganda at this point to claim 97% support for some vague "the consensus" without actually specifying what exactly "the consensus" they agree to IS. The original value of "the consensus" seems to have been: (a) CO2 is a greenhouse gas, (b) it's gotten warmer recently, (c) human activity has had a significant warming effect, where both the nature of the "human activity" and the meaning of "significant" are usually left vague and unstated. Oh, and to get a number as high as "97%" what gets measured is usually not the level of agreement among "scientists" but rather among a tiny subset, such as "those climate scientists who publish the most in the field".)