Leonardo DiCaprio won BAFTA’s Best Leading Man award on Sunday for The Revenant, but you wouldn’t know it based on his global warming comments at a post-ceremony party. That’s where he said his “real focus and passion is climate change” and if we don’t get it right, “we’re all f***ed.” While his comments may not garner him any favors with the voters at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), which is the UK’s equivalent to winning an Oscar’s Best Actor award, it should make DiCaprio’s followers happy. Lately, DiCaprio has been on a global tour trying to bring attention to the perils of global warming.
His comments came at a party hosted by Harvey Weinstein at the UK’s The Rosewood. “Winning the BAFTA is fantastic and I’m honoured, but my real focus and passion is climate change,” DiCaprio opined. That’s because DiCaprio has been working on a documentary about global warming for the last two and a half years for Netflix. He added, “I’ve been…traveling across the world from South America to China to examine how the problem is going to affect people. It is without doubt the most important question in the world right now, and if we get the answer wrong, we are all f****d.”
He also spoke earlier at the Royal Opera House where the the BAFTAs were held, saying he has had a true love for the cinema since he was a young teenager. He loved it so much, in fact, that he dropped out of high school and only later did he get pass the General Educational Development (GED) test, allowing him to earn the equivalent of a high school diploma.
Though DiCaprio talks a good global warming game and appears to be inheriting the ManBearPig torch from Al Gore, he neither went to college nor got a degree in the sciences. If he had, he might have learned that in the past five years, Arctic sea ice, which is considered the bellwether of global warming, has been rebounding year after year, and the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) shows Arctic sea ice is currently at its highest level in years for this time of the year.
As first reported by the science site No Tricks Zone (NTZ), “it appears [Arctic sea ice] has reached its highest level ever over the last decade, and its only mid February.” And according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), “global sea ice has in fact been trending upwards over the past decade.” The NTZ site also notes that other agencies show an overall trend that is not alarming.
Or that according to NASA, Antarctica has grown in size over 30 percent since 1979 when satellites began measuring the inhospitable continent, and that 150,000 penguins died after an Antarctic iceberg “grounded near their colony in Antarctica, forcing them to make a lengthy trek to find food, a study has revealed.”
