Downplaying Extreme Heat, UK News Anchor Draws Comparisons to 'Don't Look Up'

An exchange between BBC meteorologist John Hammond and a news broadcaster went viral Wednesday as climate campaigners and other observers noted its uncanny resemblance to scenes in the 2021 film Don't Look Up, in which scientists tried desperately to warn the press about a comet approaching Earth.

In the July 14 interview on GB News, Hammond spoke with news anchor Bev Turner about the forecasted extreme heat in the U.K. and other parts of Europe, which ended up breaking previous temperature records by huge margins, sparking dozens of fires across London, and killing more than 1,900 people in Spain and Portugal.

Turner immediately pushed Hammond for a sunny weather report, asking, "It's not too hot, is it?"

At the time of the interview Hammond was enjoying mild weather in Buckinghamshire, but emphasized that Britons must prepare for temperatures that could top 104degF (40degC).

Turner's insistence that Hammond be "happy about the weather" seemed ripped from the screenplay of Don't Look Up, several observers noted, as How to Fight Inequality author Ben Phillips posted the interview clip along with a scene from the film in which a news anchor tells the scientists that she tries "to keep the bad news light."

"In the race between amusing parody and horrific reality, horrific reality just took the lead," said journalist John Nichols.

Hammond warned that as temperatures reach into the hundreds, the U.K. could see "hundreds, if not thousands, of excess deaths."

"This will be potentially lethal weather for a couple of days," he added. "It will be brief but it will be brutal."

Turner quickly tried to tamp down Hammond's warning, asking if "something's happened to meteorologists to make you all a little fatalistic and harbingers of doom."

"I want us to be happy about the weather... Haven't we always had hot weather?" she asked, mentioning the summer of 1976 in the U.K., when temperatures reached nearly 90degF for more than two weeks.

Hammond explained that while the 1976 heatwave was an outlier event, the extreme heat seen across Europe in recent days was part of an established pattern in recent years.

"We are seeing more and more records, more and more frequently, and more and more severely," he said. "Heat waves are becoming more extreme."

Last summer, a heatwave across the Pacific Northwest in North America was linked to hundreds of unexpected deaths.

Excess deaths that occurred as a result of this week's extreme heat in the U.K. have not yet been reported, but the London Ambulance Service said Tuesday that it was receiving 400 calls per hour, with an increase in patients reporting heat exposure.

Hammond's attempts to convince Turner and her viewers that the extreme heat should be taken seriously proved that "reality is even worse than fiction," said applied physics professor Manilo De Domenico of the University of Padova.

"If you think that Don't Look Up is a movie not representing realistic dynamics, you have to watch this interview about heatwaves and expected excess deaths due to extremely hot weather," said De Domenico.