We’re publishing a guest post by freelance journalist Chris Morrison about the Neflix hit Don’t Look Up, an allegory about climate change denial starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence. DiCaprio plays an astronomer whose PhD student – Lawrence – discovers a giant comet that’s on a collision course with earth. It’s due to hit in six months’ time and they try and warn an unsuspecting planet. But needless to say, the threat is laughed off by politicians and media moguls alike. The film’s twin targets are Covid denial and climate change denial and its somewhat implausible premise is that the world’s elites have become insufficiently hysterical about both.
Spoiler Alert – it is highly unlikely that a comet spotted hundreds of millions of miles away can be almost immediately calculated to be on a collision path with Earth. Plotting the orbit requires many observations while the effect of outgassing as the comet nears the sun will cause significant route deviations. But let’s not allow the facts to get in the way of Hollywood’s latest climate agitprop blockbuster. Don’t Look Up needs the planet killing certainty of a comet hitting Earth to whip up further green hysteria since, as is generally accepted by all correct thinking folks, we are all going to die in a planet killing climate fireball.
The film is an allegory for “climate change denial”. This is the insult thrown at those who seek to debate the “settled” science that holds the Earth’s global temperature will soar from around 15C to 21C in the near future if we continue to use fossil fuels. It is the work of heretics to note that no peer reviewed science paper exists to credibly prove the hypothesis beyond doubt. The temperature predictions are based on little more than the guesses from always wrong climate models.
Some scientists, no doubt operating from a particularly nasty part of Satan’s lair, actually believe the role of carbon dioxide has been greatly exaggerated and most climate change, as it always has been, is due to natural causes.
Emotion and hysteria are rapidly replacing scientific inquiry. As the co-founder of Greenpeace Paul Watson once famously remarked: “It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”
During the course of Don’t Look Up, the two stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence shake regularly with rage as their collision calculations are not taken seriously. Needless to say, the F bomb is dropped constantly because of course THEY REALLY F**KING CARE. Ariane Grande pops up to trill about the coming disaster because, well, she really fucking cares too.
Commenting on the film in the Guardian, Paul Kalmus said that as a climate scientist he is doing everything he can to wake people up to avoid “planetary destruction”. In his view it is “the most accurate film about society’s terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I’ve seen”. For people like Kalmus, the Earth is breaking down with “breath-taking speed”. Alas, the terrifying rise in global temperatures is taking a holiday at the moment – about 10 years at the last count – and global warming seems to be going the way of global cooling – the fashionable settled science scare du jour of the 1970s. No worries – global warming has become climate breakdown and bad weather rebranded as extreme climate events. Faced with an unusually warm summer‘s day, Kalmus demands we “switch into full-on emergency mode”.
If it wasn’t so serious, we could just laugh. But green activists have been so successful over the last 30 years with their “settled” science propaganda that they have persuaded a Conservative Government in the U.K. to embrace the Net Zero agenda. A Marxist-inspired, control and rule agenda complete with reduced mass personal transport, higher energy costs, restricted diets and all the loss of personal freedoms that these entail. The Covid pandemic has shown just how many freedoms can be snatched away in a modern connected society by the spread of widespread fear, fuelled by selective state-sponsored science and, of course, made up models.
Kalmus’s switch to full on emergency seems to have traction in many parts of society. Last year, the actress Joanna Lumley called for “wartime” rationing to combat climate change and suggested the masses did not weekend in Magaluf. There was no word on whether she intended to stop making travel documentaries. It is thought unlikely that she celebrated her recent Damehood with a dinner of tinned snook and a thin slice of bread and marg.
Slightly more terrifying than the thoughts of Her Lumliness is Angus Forbes, who wrote a recent book calling for a Global Planet Authority to have complete control over the biosphere. Mr. Forbes, the first director of Prince Charles’s Rainforest Project, suggested turning 40% of all land on Earth into parks, maintained as “ultra light zones” incurring “almost zero human pressure”. One of the first areas he suggests could become a national park is the entire island of Madagascar.
Princeton professor and IPCC lead author Michael Oppenheimer is also keen to stop low-income countries catching up with his own. “We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialisation, we have in the U.S. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are,” he said.
At the beginning of this month, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue was reported to have said that as Covid begins to wane, “conspiracy theorists” are starting to use terms such as “Green lockdowns”. The left wing think tank stated that there was “no evidence” that people would be forced to stay at home and restrict their travel and social contacts to reduce carbon emissions.
Meanwhile back in the real world, it is obvious that many green extremists are starting to think the unthinkable. Democracy is all very well but is falling short when decisions have to be made by self-proclaimed experts going about their important work of saving the planet. Writing in the American Political Science Review last month, Ross Mittiga, Assistant Professor at the Catholic University of Chile, noted that as the climate crisis deepens, “one can find a cautious but growing chorus of praise for ‘authoritarian environmentalism’”.
He continued:
as those who have survived COVID-19 can attest, during a health emergency, severe and enduring limitations of rights to free movement, association, and speech can become legitimate techniques of government, even in robustly liberal democratic states. … herein lies the allure of authoritarian environmentalism; for if, as many now contend, liberal-democratic norms, principles, and institutions impede urgently needed climate action, then legitimacy may permit – or even require – relaxing or abandoning those constraints.
In his God Delusion book, Richard Dawkins demanded extraordinary proof for what he called the extraordinary claims of religion. He was unimpressed with the argument that the claims had all been “settled” by the teachings of the Bible. Many of the claims of the green movement are truly extraordinary and are often backed up with explanations that owe little to genuine science. Such science is done a disservice by the banning of discussion with those who dissent from prevailing orthodoxies, as is common in the mainstream media. Reason and debate are ignored and faith in an emerging ideology takes over.
All new religions and political cultures tend to destroy the old to succeed. In the fourth and fifth centuries, Christianity suddenly swept all before it in a ruthless purging of the culture, religions and social norms of the ancient world. Catherine Nixey has written a thought provoking book called The Darkening Age about these times. She details an orgy of statue and temple smashing, widespread rioting and violence, manuscript burning and general culture cancelling that removed most traces of the previous civilisations.
To the victor the spoils, and a codifying law made by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian would be infamous for the next 1,500 years. Known as Law 1.11.10.2, it read: “Moreover we forbid the teaching of any doctrine by those who labour under the insanity of paganism so that they might not corrupt the souls of their disciples.”
The supreme irony of Don’t Look Up, of course, is that the alarmism the filmmakers think has been ignored has been enthusiastically embraced in nearly every country in the world. Our problem isn’t being too sceptical when faced with apocalyptic warnings. It’s being far too credulous.
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ICC issues a demand that Sir Winston Churchill be disinterred and put on trial for defying the National SOCIALISTS.
Hahahaha! This could happen!!
Absolutely. New research shows he authorized an attack on peace-loving Germany.
Dresden, Cologne, Hamburg… thousand bomber raids = genocide.
War is a dirty business. You quote three attacks. The German people weren’t rounded up and put to death by their millions. The merits of mass bombing on population centres in terms of the duration of the war can be discussed both ways. Genocide, it wasn’t.
It was a planned genocide which didn’t work out as the planners had hoped because it took them too long to master the technology to a sufficient degree to accomplish what they had hope to achieve. There was no reason to round anyone up as people were simply targetted in their homes in densely populated areas after someone had figured out that these would “burn well.”
The military merits of aerial mass slaughter of civilians to break their morale don’t need to be discussed. In cases the necessity of a land campaign until almost all of Germany had been occupied didn’t already make this clear, US “morale bombing” in total overdrive, followed by a hasty withdrawal from the war theatre in SE Asia has answered this question: There are no military benefits.
Apart from that, intentional mass slaughter of civilians is a war crime. Intentional destruction of civilian infrastructure to accomplish mass slaughter of civilians (the dambustet raids) is a war crime. And firebombing of cities to accomplish mass slaughter of civilians is a war crime as well.
There are also a few million German civilians who fell victim to Russian ethnic cleansing of eastern middle Europe.
About time the Israeli genocidal maniacs were arrested.
As I type this the ‘votes’ on GlassHalfFull‘s comment: thumbs up show minus 3 and the thumbs down show minus eight. I have no idea what minus 3 thumbs up means or how it can be done.
I once ‘liked’ somebody’s comment and it stayed on zero. People have pointed the mystery of the thumbs out before. It’s further evidence to me how pointless they are because they don’t even function properly and change/influence absolutely nothing. Most sane DS subscribers will be back posting what they want, whenever they want, irrespective of how many little red/green numbers they collect, so why have them in the first place?
The only thing I like your comment is that you and your up-voters are funding the DS.
Why?
You don’t seem to be gaining any agreement here at least.
Well here we are again. It is a regrettable loss of lives, but genocide it isn’t. The maniacs are Hamas and Hezbollah who indoctrinate their kids and put AK47’s in their hands, and dynamite around their waists. Don’t bother replying…
It’s my duty to reply to correct your falsehoods.
Even Jewish experts on genocide and the holocaust agree that Israel is committing “genocide”.
●”It is no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions”
Professor Bartov, a former IDF soldier, is considered one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov
●”Yes, it is genocide. This is exactly what genocide looks like”
Amos Goldberg, professor of Holocaust History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote the following article about the situation in Gaza for an Israeli online magazine.
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/prof-amos-goldberg-yes-it-is-genocide/
●”A textbook case of genocide”
Raz Segal is an Israeli who is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Genocide
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
A range of views are available, but cutting and pasting stuff from naysayers on the internet isn’t changing my mind. I believe the Israeli’s have got this right, and that the ICC is nothing more than another do-good court acting beyond its remit. Please dont reply. I wont be posting again on this thread.
Yes there is attempted genocide – by Hamas and Hezbollah trying to erase Israel from the map.
Is this deja vu? What happened with the last arrest warrant?
These kids haven’t got a hope in hell of turning out like decent human beings when they attend UNRWA Jihadi School, have they? Indoctrinated to hate from birth and doomed, courtesy of their Jew-obsessed death cult, destined to be like one of their terrorist, psycho heroes. Sad;
”EXPOSED: We have obtained exclusive interviews of Palestinian students revealing what they learn in UNRWA schools. Meet Mohammad: “The solution for Jerusalem? We kill the Jews. We get rid of the Jews. Inshallah, Jews will be wiped out from all of Palestine by the grace of Allah.”
https://x.com/HillelNeuer/status/1859550369967223197
https://x.com/KenBelt3/status/1859567580706439326
Here are your darling Israeli Jews singing the following (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvTyg1kJGzM):
Let the IDF win and f*** the Arabs,
Ole, ole, ole, ole,
Why is school out in Gaza?
There are no children left there.
The amazing thing was the Jews obviously have such a clout in our media world that they managed to turn the hooliganism in Amsterdam around so as to depict the Israeli perpetrators as the victims! And everybody fell for it – or was told to fall for it.
And here again is the wonderful IDF dressing up in sexy panties and generally having a ball blowing up people’s houses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEo813rYm8g.
The day before yesterday Israel bombed Damascus and yesterday Palmyra (also Syria), all in addition to all of Lebanon, not to mention at home in Gaza.
All in the name of self-defence?!
Of course, this is in addition to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, where the IDF is assisting (other) criminal gangs in stealing humanitarian aid deliveries so that they can sell the materials at extortionate prices to the starving Palestinians.
And we are supposed to praise all Jews? Can you inform me why?
Israel has been at war with Syria for decades, I think it might date from 1948.
I am being unfair since not all Jews will support the Israeli actions. But AIPAC has all US politicians in its pocket and apparently a rich Jewish lady donated $100 million to the Trump campaign, which will ensure a strong pro-Israel presidency. Netanyahu has nothing to fear.
Yes i can…… Zionist indoctrination….
By judging them for defending Israel from self-confessed genocidal terrorists, they condemn themselves.
So will the leadership of Hamas be on the warrant list any time soon, in relation to the events of October 7th 2023?
Also still waiting (unexpectantly) for Tony Blair to join the list one day..
Now can we have arrest warrants for Putin & Zelensky for Genocide Against Slavs, and for assassinating political opponents?
And arrest warrants for Lula & Moraes for crimes against the Brazilian People, attempted assassination of the true leader Jair Bolsonaro, and arranging a Fake Coup, just like Erdogan did in Turkey, as an excuse to arrest military patriots?
And arrest warrants for Tony Blair & Gordon Brown?
That’ll do for a start…
In other news: ICC’s latest report says the holocaust was also perpetrated by the Jews. Calls for reparations to be paid to Germany to redress the historical injustice.
Signed by committee chairman B.E. Zebub
I guess I’m asking myself the same question many others are too:
Why not Blair and Bush for their illegal invasion of Iraq which has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the displacement of millions, or Obama for drone strikes all over the middle east, or Cameron and Sarkozy for bombing Libya and overthrowing the government leading to the deaths of thousands. Or Xi Jingpin for the arbitrary internment of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in western China.
Eventually these contradictions become impossible to ignore.
Oh well that will dissapoint all the war loving, pro- pointless death and destruction zealots on here… And thats about all of them….
Always surprising how many deranged folks there are around….
And if you’re going to respond…. Prove the point that it isnt pointless……….
Its quite clear to any sane person that Israel want the Palestinians gone…….
https://fb.watch/v-dftjxTJA/
All reactionaries are paper tigers. Like being savaged by a dead sheep.
I think the Israeli Ministers will manage to survive it.
Why is Tony Blair not wanted by the ICC for war crimes?
The smell of Anti Semitism is very strong,
Will Xi of China also get an arrest warrant?
He has comitted crimes.