Pirate's Cove

If ‘climate change’ is so bad then why are all these Believers taking long fossil fueled trips? Why are tour operators operating them?

More Travel Offerings Highlighting Interinfluence of Climate Change and Tourism

Walking across a sea-level glacier in Iceland, a tour guide points out how the landscape has changed in recent years. The population of cheeky puffins on a cliff’s edge has dropped by 20 percent since the start of the century due to rising ocean temperatures, the guide notes. Over a meal with fellow travelers that same day, the conversation turns to alternative energy sources helping the country curb its environmental footprint — a pertinent topic, given the meal takes place in a geothermal greenhouse.

In Iceland, like many places around the world, signs of the climate crisis abound. Some visitors see the country’s landscape as a single snapshot in time; they remain oblivious to global warming’s impact as they take in the waterfalls, wildlife and wide-open vistas. But for visitors traveling with the Transformative Adventure to Iceland to Inspire Climate Action tour, global warming frames the entire context of the trip.

Sounds like a lame vacation. But, the your operator is making some cash from cultists, eh? And none of them are getting to Iceland without a fossil fueled airplane trip or boat

Not so long ago, using the climate as an overriding theme for a guided tour would have been unheard of. Tourism has historically shielded people from “the real world,” but it can no longer deny the reality in which it operates. And the reality is, the impacts of climate change can be seen and felt everywhere.

Impacts like a big fossil fueled vacation? Me, I’d rather just go somewhere for fun.

This has precipitated the question of not if but how travel service providers should communicate with tourists about the climate. Several solutions have surfaced — including developing incentive programs encouraging climate-positive behaviors, incorporating voluntary and mandatory responsible travel pledges, and publishing carbon labels alongside other relevant tour information.

So stupid. None of this reduces the carbon footprint of these doomsday cultists. They want to “help”? Stay home. Do a virtual tour.

This tour is only one of a growing selection of climate-focused experiences. Natural Habitat’s Climate Change & Our Wild World series of trips, for example, take place in the Arctic and the Amazon. Conducted in collaboration with World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the trips offer insight into WWF’s conservation efforts and how the organization is protecting “humanity from the worst effects of climate change,” according to Natural Habitat’s website.

Similarly, Earthwatch offers several such trips — including its 11-day Climate Change at the Arctic’s Edge trip and five-day Recovery of the Great Barrier Reef, in which guests help scientists with coral recovery. The active, 9-day Wildlife in the Changing Andorran Pyrenees tour entices travelers with the promise that they can “help discover and protect this delicate Alpine environment from climate change, and from ourselves.”

Cash grab.