Anchor Bev Turner interrupted.
“So John, I want us to be happy with the weather and all—I don’t know if something has happened to the weathermen to make you all a little doom and gloom.”
clips about a three-minute segment on a right-wing news network — as it is sometimes called Britain’s Fox News – went viral. By Thursday morning, one Hammond’s interview, which juxtaposed a scene from the movie Don’t Look Up, garnered more than 18 million views on Twitter. In this scene, an astronomer played by Jennifer Lawrence screams during a news segment that a meteor is about to strike and destroy it. Earth, only to have a TV anchor tell him they were trying to “cover the bad news.”
Hammond’s prediction of brutal heat has come true. Since he appeared on GB News, the United Kingdom and much of Europe has been abuzz. Britain broke its highest temperature record on Tuesday and officials there described the heatwave as a “national emergency”. Much of England, including London, was hit with the country’s first “red” warning, meaning the heat was dangerous even for healthy people. The Associated Press reported on this. Meanwhile, forest fires engulfed the countries of the European continent.
Neither GB News nor Turner immediately responded to The Washington Post’s requests for comment on Thursday. though Turner was honored Wednesday On Twitter, Hammond said he was right to say the country was “unprepared to deal” with the heat, which is why he said there were no abnormal deaths. Hammond told The Post in an online message that it was too early to calculate such numbers.
After Turner asked him to be happy with the weather, Hammond backed off. Again he reminded her that he had predicted that he would kill people. “I don’t think we should be too sanguine that many will die early next week from the heat.”
Turner compared the heat wave to the one that happened 46 years ago: “Haven’t we always had hot weather, John? 76 – The summer of 76 wasn’t so hot, was it?
“Uh, no,” Hammond replied. He’s right—the peak temperature that year was about 96.6 degrees Fahrenheit (35.9 degrees Celsius), compared to 104.5 (40.3) so far this year. According to the BBC. Hammond said that although people brought up 1976 as a way to deny climate change, it was a “freak event”. He said during a GB News segment that, in contrast to that indicator, Britain is now “seeing records more and more frequently and more seriously”.
This week, Turner played down his heatwave on Twitter multiple times. on Wednesdayhe griped about “all this heat hyperbole.” MondayTurner said he was enjoying a “nice breeze.”
“If everyone hadn’t told me not to be afraid… I wouldn’t have felt it,” she wrote.
For many people, there’s still a disconnect between what they’ve always known as “nice weather”—clear skies, sunshine—and the reality that hot days will only become more extreme and harmful because of climate change. , Hammond told The Post.
“The concept of thousands of excess deaths is not clear to many,” he said. “In the same way that we don’t ‘get’ the threat of climate change until it affects us personally, until floodwaters spill over our doorsteps or until food is left out of a drought.”
Hammond said he hopes his brush with internet fame will help change that.
“It certainly started a conversation about the language we use and how we communicate the threat of extreme weather in our forecasts,” he said. “It must be a good thing.”
