Posted by
Average Voter on Sunday, May 18, 2008 12:02:56 PM
The Seattle Times has an article today on 10 places you should visit before global warming makes them dissappear. They are referring to destinaitions that include glacier sight seeing. It's called 'Eco-Touring'.
It's been called climate sightseeing, a kind of farewell tour of Earth's greatest hits. Hard data is not available — determining exactly why people go where they do is next to impossible. But a clear interest in ecotourism, coupled with much greater accessibility to places like the Earth's poles, means more people are visiting faraway and endangered sites, whatever their motives.
But here is what is funny:
The subject is full of paradoxes: The more you travel, for example, the more you're contributing to the problem that made you go to an endangered site in the first place. And some places — Canada, perhaps Russia and other cold climes — are likely to attract more tourists as they warm.
Robert Henson, a meteorologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and author of "The Rough Guide to Climate Change," says: "Stay longer. Go ahead and travel, but do it smartly. Get direct flights; use a train to get around."
Stay longer, spend twice as much to get there, and tread lightly even though there is nothing we can do to control the climate of our planet Earth.
Once upon a time, practically the entire continental United States was covered in ice. What caused that? A phenomenon called global cooling? If humans hadn't survived, maybe the planet would be one big ice ball and that would be the norm.
Maybe in our childrens-childrens-childrens lifetime, the glaciers will be encroaching on our towns again. and four generations after that, we will have to learn to live on the ice.