A British news anchor’s dismissive response to the brutal heatwave currently blasting Europe has spawned comparisons on social media to the Netflix climate change allegory “Don’t Look Up”.
GB News anchor Bev Turner was speaking with meteorologist John Hammond about the “lethal weather” in London, but appeared not to comprehend the gravity of the situation.
“See John, you’re outside enjoying the sunshine. It’s not too hot, is it?” Turner asked.
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While Hammond conceded it was not as scorching as it was the previous day, he also noted that temperatures would be rising in the coming days, describing the forecasts as “frightening” while warning that Britain could experience “hundreds if not thousands of excess deaths” in the early part of next week.
“This will be potentially lethal weather for a couple of days. It will be brief but it will be brutal,” Hammond warned, with Turner interrupting to minimize what was happening.
“I don’t know if something has happened to meteorologists to make you all a little bit fatalistic and harbingers of doom, but broadcasters — particularly on the BBC — every time I’ve turned on, anyone is talking about the weather and they’re saying there’s going to be tons of fatalities,” Turner said dismissively. “But haven’t we always had hot weather, John? Wasn’t the summer of ’76 — that was as hot as this, wasn’t it?”
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“Er, no,” Hammond responded. “We are seeing more and more records, more and more frequently, and more more severely, so yes, some people always hark back to the summer of 1976, which was a freak event, over 40 years ago”
He added: “But heatwaves are becoming more extreme, this is yet another one that is coming down the tracks towards us and I don’t think we should be too lighthearted over the fact that many are going to die over the next week because of the heat.”
The exchange caught the interest of Twitter users, whose comparisons to a similar scene in Netflix’s “Don’t Look Up” led #DontLookUp to trend.