Viral TV News Clip Called Out as Alarmingly Similar to ‘Don’t Look Up’ Scene

It’s not unique or particularly revelatory to state that, especially lately, it often feels like the world is ending and nobody gives even the most teeny-tiny of shits about it.

Perfectly illustrating this facet of modern life is a recently-made-viral clip of a report from U.K.-based outlet GB News featuring weather expert John Hammond. 

As seen below in a tweet that’s brought global attention to the clip in question, how this report went down has people comparing it to a similarly alarming sequence in last year’s Adam McKay-directed apocalyptic comedy Don’t Look Up, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as a pair of scientists whose findings about impending planetary doom are treated with the same level of seriousness as here-today, gone-tomorrow gossip.

“I think there will be hundreds if not thousands of excess deaths early next week,” Hammond is seen telling news anchors when discussing the ramifications of a quite serious U.K. heatwave. “Charts that I can see in front of me are frightening. … This will not be nice weather, this will be potentially lethal weather for a couple days.”

To Hammond’s clear befuddlement, one anchor interjected to say they want viewers to instead “be happy about the weather” before complaining about what she describes as “fatalistic” meteorologists who are “harbingers of doom.” Furthermore, the anchor downplayed the severity of the grave climate concerns and the loss of life by arguing that hot weather has always existed.

While Hammond refuted this, and urged everyone to not be “lighthearted” about so many people dying, the clip has been spread widely in recent days as proof of just how seemingly fucked we all are.

Here in the States, President Biden just this week spoke about the threat of climate change, calling it “literally, not figuratively, a clear and present danger” for humankind.

“Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world,” Biden, who one day later was announced to have tested positive for COVID-19, said.