Bob Odenkirk & Errol Morris Create Comedic Shorts to Help You Take Action Against Global Warming: Watch Them Online

My beach house must be some­where around here. I used to be able to see the ocean from it. I should be able to see it from the ocean. Ooo, that looks famil­iar. Lady Lib­er­ty. Ha ha! Hel­looo! All the best to you.     —Admi­ral Hor­a­tio Horn­tow­er

Are there any Bet­ter Call Saul fans among the glob­al warm­ing deniers?

A sce­nario in which one can simul­ta­ne­ous­ly pooh pooh the melt­ing of the polar ice caps and embrace The Thin Blue Line?

Direc­tor Errol Mor­ris and his star, Bob Odenkirk, may not change any minds with their Glob­al Melt­down spots they pro­duced in part­ner­ship with the Insti­tute for the Future, but hope­ful­ly the emphat­ic end cards will stir some fans to action.

The absur­dist 30-sec­ond shorts fea­ture Odenkirk, encrust­ed in epaulets and naval insignia, as the fic­tion­al Horn­tow­er, “an admi­ral of a fleet of one and per­haps the last man on Earth.” Marooned on a small block of ice, he rails against the inex­pert­ly ani­mat­ed wildlife encroach­ing on his domain.

(“You don’t even have the facil­i­ty of lan­guage!” he tells a pen­guin, and lat­er threat­ens a wal­rus that it will “get paint­ed out” of the final cut for “com­plain­ing all the time…”)

Cer­tain­ly a doc­u­men­tar­i­an of Mor­ris’ stature could have tak­en a length­i­er, more seri­ous approach to the sub­ject, but as he notes:

Log­ic rarely con­vinces any­body of any­thing. Cli­mate change has become yet anoth­er vehi­cle for polit­i­cal polar­iza­tion. If Al Gore said the Earth was round there would be polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion insist­ing that the Earth was flat. It’s all so pre­pos­ter­ous, so con­temptible.

Odenkirk also has some out-of-uni­form con­cerns about cli­mate change, as expressed in “Where I Got These Abs,” a 2011 Shouts & Mur­murs piece for The New York­er:

The mid­dle ab on the left (not my left, your left, if you are look­ing at me) is called Ter­rence. It’s a dig­ni­fied ab. It tens­es each time I read an op-ed arti­cle about glob­al warm­ing. The article’s point of view is imma­te­r­i­al; sim­ply being remind­ed that I can do noth­ing to stop the hor­rif­ic future of floods and cat­a­stro­phe gives this ab a taut yank that lingers, burn­ing calo­ries in my well-creased fore­head at the same time. 

Watch all of Mor­ris and Odenkirk’s Admi­ral Horn­tow­er spots, cur­rent­ly total­ing nine, with ten more to come, on Glob­al Melt­down’s YouTube chan­nel.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cli­mate Change Gets Strik­ing­ly Visu­al­ized by a Scot­tish Art Instal­la­tion

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

NASA Cap­tures the World on Fire

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Join her in NYC this Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 9 for the new season’s kick­off of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.