Bill Weir's Road to Optimism.

Bill Weir is a CNN anchor, Chief Climate Correspondent and was the host and executive producer of the acclaimed CNN Original Series "The Wonder List with Bill Weir." He is a featured speaker and moderator for the Smithsonian's Earth Optimism Summit, participating in discussions on solutions for coastal climate change and food waste. After the first day of the Summit, Earth Optimism communications lead Cat Kutz interviews Weir to learn more about what gives him hope in the face of climate change and what to expect from his upcoming CNN special.

Catch Bill's 90-minute special on Saturday April 25, 2020 on CNN.

Human beings are the most powerful force in the known universe because we are made of stories. We are the one creature that can imagine a different reality and work together to make it happen. While most of our big stories through time have involved "conquering nature" to fit our needs, we are just know understanding the true cost.

But the great thing about stories is that they are always under revision and the great thing about nature is that it can bounce back with incredible resilience if given a chance. I'm an Earth Optimist because I truly believe my children's generation is going to write a better story for man's place on this planet.

Read the story from the Smithsonian magazine by Cat Kutz - “Bill Weir's Road to Optimism.”

Poland’s coal miners: ‘EU climate proposals terrify us’

As Poland gears up to host this year’s UN climate summit, the government is on a charm offensive.

An old mine shaft in Katowice looms over
the glass buildings of the Silesian museum.

During two days in mid-September, brochures, videos, slides and dark-suited representatives succeed one another, portraying Katowice, the site of the talks, as a green success story. Chaperoned by civil servants, journalists are whizzed around the city in electric cars.

At its industrial peak in the 1980s, the capital of Upper Silesia counted 14 active coal mines. That figure has fallen to two, while museums, concert halls and sport facilities have mushroomed on former mining sites – not to mention the spaceship-like conference centre that will welcome up to 30,000 delegates in December.

Read the story by Natalie Sauer from Climate Home News - “Poland’s coal miners: ‘EU climate proposals terrify us’.”

Climate wars have cost us the chance to lead

The climate wars between the major political parties have cost us a host of lost business and employment opportunities, even a global leadership role, and yet we drift on without an energy policy that might provide some relief to rising power costs and some strategy to meet our commitments to reduce emissions.

John Hewson takes us through the climate wars.

The government’s most recent policy, the National Electricity Guarantee (NEG), is the fourth most effective response, only being proposed after an emissions trading scheme, an emissions intensity scheme and Finkel’s clean energy target were sequentially rejected.

In this sense, the guarantee is the last, and only, game in town, but it is still likely to be exhaustively debated, mostly for not moving fast or far enough, with concern about the longer-term future of the renewables sector.

Read John Hewson’s opinion piece from The Age - “Climate wars have cost us the chance to lead.”

Of 21 Winter Olympic Cities, Many May Soon Be Too Warm to Host the Games

Distill the upcoming Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, to their essence and you get 15 sports that involve gliding on snow or ice. Because of climate change, though, by 2050 many prior Winter Games locations may be too warm to ever host the Games again.

Cross-country skiers at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. 

A team of researchers, led by Daniel Scott, a geography professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, came to that conclusion by taking climate data from previous Winter Games locations and applying climate-change models to predict future winter weather conditions.

The research, originally published in 2014, was updated this month to include the Pyeongchang Olympics, which begin Feb. 9, and the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing.

Read The New York Times story - "Of 21 Winter Olympic Cities, Many May Soon Be Too Warm to Host the Games.”

The changing disease climate

Virus and bacterial diseases don’t appear out of nowhere, and most require a host to stay active, reproduce and evolve. Insects and other animals play a key role in this - around 60 percent of infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonotic – which means they’re spread from animals to humans.

Australia has never experienced a large outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.

But this is a pattern also true of 75 percent of new or emerging infectious diseases.

Tracking disease prevalence, spread and movement among populations of animals is the role of veterinary epidemiologists like Dr Simon Firestone, Professor Mark Stevenson and Dr Anke Wiethoelter at the University of Melbourne.

“A nice analogy would be that a traditional veterinarian’s client is a single animal; a veterinary epidemiologist’s client is the country and all the farms and animals in that ecosystem,” Professor Stevenson says.

Read University of Melbourne Pursuit story - “The changing disease climate.”