For his job as CNN chief climate correspondent Bill Weir gets to travel to some of the most beautiful parts of the world. He also gets to lecture people on the need to decarbonize the economy, as he did on Wednesday’s CNN This Morning from Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city in the world that is roughly 6,600 miles from CNN’s New York headquarters.
Not only was Weir 6,600 miles from home, he was about get further away. After noting the beauty of the place, Weir told the studio hosts, “I'm about to get on a boat with a whale scientist and go on an adventure to study those amazing creatures” in Antarctica.
Weir then tried to claim that he wasn’t being a hypocrite for his cross-world travels, he just happened to be in the right place at the right time:
But while we're here we got this news out of the National Snow and Ice Center in Colorado that for the second year in a row the South Pole is shrinking. The ice down here is shrinking. It's sea ice so it's not affecting sea level rise much the way that when ice cubes in your glass melt they don't spill your drink. But it's very worrying because Antarctica is a continent surrounded by oceans and that sea ice protects those ice shelves from unlocking all of that ice, which if it dumps into the oceans en masse would rearrange every city from Miami to Shanghai along the coasts around the world.
After some more warnings about shrinking Antarctic ice levels, host Don Lemon asked, “Is there anything that can be done to really slow this horrible extreme situation, Bill?
If viewers have or now want to put Patagonia or Antarctica on their travel bucket list, Weir was there to throw cold water on their dreams, “It's the -- it's the same answer as it -- as it has been for generations. The faster we can move away from fuels that burn, in the speediest and most equitable way possible, the less horrible this gets. That's the -- that's the only way right now. And not only stopping it at the source but pulling carbon out of the sea and sky. Carbon removal is going to be the biggest industry you've never heard of as people come to grips with the enormity of this.”
Doubling down on the urgency of the situation, Weir elaborated, “to put this in perspective, Antarctica was discovered almost 40 years after the planet Uranus. It's so remote, it's so harsh we're just now really understanding it. But when they send these robots that look like torpedoes under these big ice shelves, like the Thwaites, and see that they're hanging on by fingernails, we've really got to pay attention to something that seems too far away.”
It'll be easier to take alarmist climate predictions seriously when the climate alarmists start practicing what they preach. At roughly 6,600 miles, Weir’s trip to Ushuaia was roughly twice as long as his journey to Glasgow, Scotland, and three times as long as his trip to Ilulissat, Greenland, not to mention all his other travels.
This segment was sponsored by Safelite.
Here is a transcript for the March 1 show:
CNN This Morning
3/1/2023
7:36 PM ET
BILL WEIR: Who knew -- who knew that the end of the world would be so gorgeous? And check out the -- maybe the most beautiful soccer pitch in the world right over there. That's some guy's yard. That's fit for Lionel Messi here in Argentina.
That island over in the distance is a Chilean national park and on the other side of that is Antarctica. That's why we're here. I'm about to get on a boat with a whale scientist and go on an adventure to study those amazing creatures.
But while we're here we got this news out of the National Snow and Ice Center in Colorado that for the second year in a row the South Pole is shrinking. The ice down here is shrinking. It's sea ice so it's not affecting sea level rise much the way that when ice cubes in your glass melt they don't spill your drink.
But it's very worrying because Antarctica is a continent surrounded by oceans and that sea ice protects those ice shelves from unlocking all of that ice, which if it dumps into the oceans en masse would rearrange every city from Miami to Shanghai along the coasts around the world.
So what is troubling about this is the speed that it’s declined. Just to give you some perspective, in the early 2000s, it looked like Antarctica was growing even as the Arctic was shrinking in alarming ways and scientists weren't sure why.
In 2014, the sea ice around Antarctica, seven million square miles. Now, less than a decade later it's under 700,000 square miles, so that's a 90 percent drop.
And they're just worried that this could be a tipping point that makes that vulnerable and then on from there it's just one domino after another of the kind of disasters we really don't want to imagine but have to think about, especially for people -- leaders who live on coasts.
DON LEMON: Is there anything that can be done to really slow this horrible extreme situation, Bill?
WEIR: It's the -- it's the same answer as it -- as it has been for generations. The faster we can move away from fuels that burn, in the speediest and most equitable way possible, the less horrible this gets. That's the -- that's the only way right now. And not only stopping it at the source but pulling carbon out of the sea and sky. Carbon removal is going to be the biggest industry you've never heard of as people come to grips with the enormity of this.
But to put this in perspective, Antarctica was discovered almost 40 years after the planet Uranus. It's so remote, it's so harsh we're just now really understanding it. But when they send these robots that look like torpedoes under these big ice shelves, like the Thwaites, and see that they're hanging on by fingernails, we've really got to pay attention to something that seems too far away.
