Climate Tourists: Celebrating Earth's Destruction?
31.10.2007
The Maldives are sinking. Visit now? Photo credit: AhmedZahid
Global warming has opened up a new travel niche known as climate tourism.
Climate tourists travel to places which are seeing the effects of global warming in a visible way. That includes glaciers in the Arctic Circle, or the Maldives, both of which are threatened by climate change and could, if temperatures keep rising, disappear.
On the other hand, tourists are also starting to flock to places like the Svalbard Islands, which have global warming to thank for their evolution into a popular tourist destination. As The Herald puts it, warmer temperatures have taken "the harsh edge off the environment and (make) the area increasingly attractive to holidaymakers."
Ironically enough, this new brand of tourism perpetuates global warming. Planes and cruise ships release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The extent to which that results in global warming is debatable, but an obvious ethical question does arise:
Does any potential benefit of climate tourism outweigh its negative aspects?
Posted by dr.pepper 15:41 Archived in Ecotourism
I don't think there really are more and more flights lately just because of this kind of tourism. People have visited the Maldives Islands for other reasons, both now and in the past. Places like Svalbard, Greenland and Antarctica are still cold, even in their summers and fluctuations in temperatures are still normal. Better examples of 'visit now' places would be Tuvalu (the first country to be flooded) and tigers in India (close to extinction just because of ignorant people, not climate).
02.11.2007 by Utrecht