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This Real Life Weather Report Feels Ripped Straight From ‘Don’t Look Up’

This Real Life Weather Report Feels Ripped Straight From ‘Don’t Look Up’

Don’t Look Up, Adam McKay’s thinly veiled satire of climate change inaction, took a lot of critical heat for being a little too on the nose. And maybe that’s fair but, then again, if your movie starts to mirror real life than maybe it’s not so much “on the nose” as it is “prescient.” That’s the situation we’re looking at here, as Latvian programmer Jānis Lācis dropped a Don’t Look Up clip next to a weather report from GB News in the UK, and the parallels are so striking it’s almost uncomfortable.

The first clip finds Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett talking about keeping “the bad news light.” The second clip finds real life news anchor Bev Turner interviewing meteorologist John Hammond about the nation’s (then) upcoming heatwave.

“By early next week, you can scratch 20 degrees, it could well be 40 degrees [104 degrees Fahrenheit],” Hammond said. “I think there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of excess deaths. … This will not be nice weather. This will be potentially lethal weather.”

Turner then channeled the climate — er — asteroid denialists in McKay’s movie, chiding Hammond for being a downer. “I want us to be happy about the weather,” she said. “I don’t know whether something’s happened to meteorologists to make you all a little fatalistic.”

Well, Hammond turned out to be right. The UK did hit a record 40 degrees earlier this week, and while there’s not yet an exact death toll, Buzzfeed News points out that heat is earth’s most lethal weather event.

Earlier this year, McKay spoke to RELEVANT about his belief that people of faith can be the turning point in humankind’s fight against climate change. “I really feel like faith is going to be the bedrock of this movement,” he said. “Because faith taps into our higher powers, our humility. We need to, first off, supplicate. We need to get down, bow our head on the ground and acknowledge reality.”

You can read McKay’s full conversation here.

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