Clip Of U.K. Newscaster Downplaying Heat Wave Compared To Satire ‘Don’t Look Up’

by Jacob LindenJuly 31, 2022, 6:18 pmDaily Digest, News, News Feed >

As the United Kingdom and areas of the U.S. go through an unprecedented summer heat wave, some users online have pointed to the media discussion around increasing dangers due to climate change and seen that it parallels a recent film’s satire that some thought was too heavy-handed.

The film Don’t Look Up came to Netflix last year and featured a team of scientists trying to warn an uninterested world of a looming meteorite crash. Its director Adam McKay has said that the film is an allegory for the world’s response to climate change, and the clip shows how eerily insightful the film really was.

The online comparison begins with a clip of Jennifer Lawrence‘s character pleading with the fictional news hosts played by Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett but going nowhere. It then plays a real, and much more bleak, interview from British TV.

The interview from GBN began with the anchor Bev Turner asking the show’s meteorologist John Hammond, “It’s not too hot, is it?”

Hammond said the weather was good as of last week when the interview was recorded, but warned that temperatures would be rising and could cause “excess deaths,” also saying “it will be brief, but it will be brutal.”

Turner apparently wasn’t liking his tone, and then cut off Hammond to say, “I want us to be happy about the weather. I don’t know whether something’s happened to meteorologists to make you all a bit fatalistic and harbingers of doom.”

Hammond retorted that he had concerns because heat waves are becoming “more extreme,” and also added, “I don’t think we should be too light-hearted over the fact that many are going to die over the next week because of the heat.”