People and Community Science and Technology

CNN special report on climate crisis to air Saturday

Bill Weir, CNN’s chief climate correspondent, previewed the special during a climate symposium panel discussion at the University of Miami earlier this year.
Aerial shot of Rosenstiel School
The University of Miami marine campus on Virginia Key. Photo: TJ Lievonen/University of Miami

Bill Weir, the CNN correspondent who moderated the University of Miami’s Miami Climate Symposium 2020 panel discussion last January, explores the climate crisis in a 90-minute special scheduled to premiere at 10 p.m. Saturday, April 25.  

In “The Road to Change: America’s Climate Crisis,” Weir embarked on a road trip to explore how the climate crisis is already transforming life throughout the United States. 

Weir journeyed from the Alaskan glaciers to the Florida Keys, from western wildfires to the struggling heartland, and explained how the dominoes of disaster could fall sooner than most of us realize. He spoke with those confronting the real and devastating impacts of a warming planet. One of his first stops was South Florida—ground zero for climate change—and it included a visit to the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science on Virginia Key.

“We talk about climate change, and we go from the scary science to all these technological wonders. But we skip what is missing in the middle, which is the loss of life as we know it,” Weir, who became CNN’s first chief climate correspondent in 2019, said at January’s symposium held on the Coral Gables campus. “Even if we do everything needed to make that deep carbon cliff, that means every landscape will be covered in solar panels, every hillside in turbines. It’ll mean giant carbon-capture plantations. It’ll mean a new kind of concrete, a new kind of mining, a new kind of farming, different kinds of economies. Politics will change.”

According to Weir, while filming the year-long project, he discovered how the climate crisis will eventually touch every aspect of human life—the social, financial, political, and psychological aspects of the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. Others interviewed for the special report include former Vice President Al Gore and climate activist Greta Thunberg. 

 

The Road to Change: America’s Climate Crisis will stream live for subscribers the day of its premiere via CNNgo (at CNN.com/go and via CNNgo apps for Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire, Samsung Smart TV, and Android TV) and on the CNN mobile apps for iOS and Android. It will also be available the day after the broadcast premiere and on demand via cable/satellite systems, CNNgo platform, and CNN mobile apps.