Meet CNN’s Bill Weir, The Anthony Bourdain Of Climate Reporting

“My name is Bill Weir, and I’m a storyteller.”

That’s how CNN’s chief climate correspondent introduces himself in a teaser for the new season of his show “The Wonder List.” Which, for the uninitiated, is a combination travelogue and climate science docuseries that, first and foremost, tries to make viewers fall in love with the world by taking them to swoon-worthy, far-flung corners of the planet.

Step two of Weir’s mission involves him pulling off a narrative sleight of hand — getting viewers to care and to feel a sense of urgency about climate change. About its disparate impacts, and the existential danger of it all.

Where he breaks ranks with the approach of something like the recent Netflix
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climate change film “Don’t Look Up” — which many critics who agreed with the premise felt was pedantic and unnecessarily heavy-handed — is in the realm of style. Weir’s is a much more approachable, “Here, let me tell you a story” method of persuasion. Indeed, with his conversational tone, and the guileless enthusiasm for his subject, it can feel at times like you’re watching the Anthony Bourdain of climate reporting.

“The Wonder List” Season Four on CNN+

The new season of “The Wonder List,” which includes four episodes, hits CNN+ on April 21 as an exclusive to the new streaming service (which is also home to Season 1-3 of the show). And the first thing you need to know about the show, Weir told me in an interview, is that it’s meant for “wanderers of all ages.”

“I’m talking to like-minded explorers,” Weir said, by way of explaining who he’s trying to reach with the show. “People who are curious about the world and travel, faraway lands and different cultures.

“I’m talking to those bucket-listers who would love to see all the wonders of the world and just letting them know what’s special about what’s still there. What’s changing. And what some locals are trying to do to hold on to what makes them special.”

In terms of those wonders he’ll visit this season, Weir picked three domestic spots and one international destination: Montana, Charleston, Hawaii, and Greenland. Some of that was a function of the Covid era, with all its attendant restrictions. Once CNN gave the green light for a new season, though, Weir and his team swung back into action pretty quickly — for the first time in several years.

Climate change and global warming

“This beat is everything,” Weir told me. “It’s food and clothing and transportation and housing and politics and economies and health and foreign policy — all of which depend on a stable planet.

“Most people don’t understand that we hit the sweet spot with this planet, the only one we know about that has the right amount of temperature and freshwater to create these thriving societies. We don’t appreciate how fast they’re going away, in geological time.”

Weir’s show originally ran on CNN from 2015 to 2017. CNN+ (where the three prior seasons are already streaming) will also be the exclusive home of the new season at a time when the nascent streamer is trying to woo subscribers with a mix of news-heavy series, documentaries, and other exclusive programming like Weir’s globe-trotting show.

Which will, time and again, take your breath away thanks to the cinematic framing of each little corner of the planet that Weir decides to spend some time in — and spin up a story about.

Take his thoughts, for example, on visiting Montana for the new season of “The Wonder List.” People there are “buying ranches sight unseen off the internet. And I just wondered how that would change the last best place.

“It’s a modern land rush that’s going on there. You’ve got cowboys living next to new neighbors who sure don’t know how to birth a calf in the middle of the night or what to do when a bear wanders by. The small towns are booming and real estate prices are out of control. So I just wondered how locals are reacting to something like that.”

In Charleston, the story is about rising sea level. A billion-dollar sea wall is getting built. People are elevating their mansions, and creating a debate that Weir found particularly fascinating: Who gets to survive in a world with higher seas?

When Weir visited Hawaii, it was just opening up after reeling from the disappearance of millions of visitors overnight as a result of the Covid pandemic. “It was a big hit to the economy, but it allowed native Hawaiians to see what the place was like before we all showed up in our sunscreen.”

The only international setting this time involved a trip to Greenland. Which Weir described to me as more or less Ground Zero of the climate story, as a result of the speed with which land ice is melting there.

“Climate change is no longer a story about thermodynamics or physics or technology,” Weir continued, echoing a recent and very dire prediction about the planet from ex-Google
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CEO Eric Schmidt. “It’s about human psychology. It’s about us all coming to grips with the reality that the fuels we’ve relied on could be our undoing.

“That’s such a big problem to wrap your head around. Because it’s been framed as a faraway story — either in time or space, depending on where you are.”

“More fragile than we think”

Rather than a kind of environmental 9/11 that jolts the planet into collective action, he thinks the problem will manifest itself in the fullness of time similar to how Mike went bankrupt in “The Sun Also Rises” — Gradually, then suddenly.

“So, what I’m looking to do is the basic storytelling technique of taking the viewer on a ride,” Weir said. “None of this matters to the viewer if I don’t start at the beginning and make them fall in love with the protagonist. Which may be a glacier, or a lake, or Greenland.

“All the stuff we take for granted that keeps us alive on this planet is more fragile than we think.”