Climate Change as Tourism Opportunity

In a travesty of journalism this week the Scotsman chirpily reported the ‘upside’ of climate change, noting how we’d have fewer deaths, opportunities for tourism, ‘new crops’, and how the ‘melting of the Arctic ice-sheet could result in new trade routes’.

How does that work exactly? “Welcome to Scotland, try mountain biking on what used to be a snow-covered mountain. We know large parts of the world have been rendered uninhabitable, but check-out our new sort of wheat!”

Read the full article here which graced the front page with the headline ‘Climate Change to Benefit Scotland’.

Labour’s Lewis Macdonald writes: “Climate change has made it easier for businesses in Scotland to access areas in Canada and North America for trade. This is very much the silver lining of climate change. But there are opportunities for Scottish enterprise from the changes that we are seeing in terms of these new trade routes.”

It’s difficult to know how to begin to respond to deep-level stupidity of both the Krebs report and the moral vacuum that Lewis Macdonald and the Scotsman ‘Scottish Political Correspondent’ Andrew Whitaker seem to be operating in. Whilst the reality of climate change means that adaptation is a worthwhile subject of investigation, this sort or merry musing on the ‘benefits’ is profoundly depressing. Is it a sign of a complete ignorance of the subject and its dire consequence for generations to come?

To describe runaway climate change in the terms of a business opportunity is an incredible statement for Lord John Krebs the head of a UK govt advisory body on climate change. What does this tell us about UK govt attitudes and where we are as a society in responding to these challenges?

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  1. Scottish republic says:

    “””””””””””””the Scotsman chirpily reported the ‘upside’ of climate change”””””””””””””

    I can explain this – the Scotsman has no sense of reporting the news anymore and just publishes and apparently endless stream of opinion pieces. The opinion pieces are cheap for the Scotsman to print and they need chirpy pieces to balance the Brit nat anti-SNP/independence wallpaper they print… so what if the pieces are in bad taste, ill-thought out and imbecilic, they’re happy and chirpy.

  2. Mudfries says:

    Is there absolutely no type of rubbish that the Labour party spout the the Scotsman wont print? it seems not.

  3. duma says:

    Humans flourish when the temperature rises. Just think, vineyards and olive groves in the borders?

    Looking out my window at the November dreichness I yearn for Mediterranean weather.

    On the other hand the Cairngorms are experiencing yet another snow filled tourist drawing early winter.

    It is difficult to believe any of this MMGW stuff as there are so many vested interests and so many charlatans out there who are chasing grants and sponsors. The one person that makes sense to me is Piers Morgan who has an 80% strike rate predicting weather patterns by reading the activity of the big fiery thing that created us and sustains us, the Sun. He has a very low opinion of the MMGW theorists, who seem to get annoyed when their computers tell them what we all know, weather is changeable.

    1. Trust you all have a reliable supply of clean drinking and irrigation water!

    2. Douglas Strang says:

      That’ll be Piers Morgan the respected climate scientist I presume?

      What exactly is it you find so difficult to believe about man made global warming? Or is it that you reject anything which questions our culture’s belief that we can do whatever we want, and that there won’t be consequences?

      1. duma says:

        I certainly do not reject arguments that say we have to live in a much more sustainable way on this planet. However that is tempered with a large does of cynicism when we look at the people and the methodologies used to produce the figures that are supposed to prove that we are creating global warming.

        According to some, you are only allowed to express and opinion on this if you are an internationally recognised and respected climate scientist!

        Really! So let us look at the CV of the highest heid yin of them all, one Rajendra K. Pachauri head of the IPCC.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajendra_K._Pachauri

        Not one qualification I can see on climate science.

        There are as many opinions out there for, as there are against. There is vested interest and big big money at play.

        Carbon trading in now one of the largest commodities on the worlds financial markets.

        Hide the decline, hockey stick graph, the medieval warm period, Al Gores lies, sea levels in the Maldives, there is to much dishonesty attatched to the MMGW movement which has become fascist.

        Andy,

        I just read your article on sea level alarm in the Maldives. You may not be aware of a study there by Nils-Axel Morner, a Swedish sea level expert (former president of the INQUA Commission of Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution). Attached is photographic evidence by Morner that sea level in the Maldives is not rising relative to the coasts but has indeed fallen! Global sea level has been rising at a rate of about a foot per century but the Maldives are either rising or subject to a local sea level anomaly related to ocean currents and evaporation rates. Thus, the ‘poster child’ of Gore’s sea level alarm is invalid.

        Don

        The tree on the beach that was overturned because it proved that the Maldives is at no risk.

        “This tree, which I showed in the documentary, is interesting. This is a prison island, and when peo-ple left the island, from the ’50s, it was a marker for them, when they saw this tree alone out there, they said, “Ah, freedom!” They were allowed back. And there have been writings and talks about this. I knew that this tree was in that terrible position already in the 1950s. So the slightest rise, and it would have been gone. I used it in my writings and for television. You know what happened? There came an Australian sea-level team, which was for the IPCC and against me. Then the stu-dents pulled down the tree by hand! They destroyed the evidence. What kind of people are those? And we came to launch this film, “Doomsday Called Off,” right after, and the tree was still green. And I heard from the locals that they had seen the people who had pulled it down. So I put it up again, by hand, and made my TV program. I haven’t told anybody else, but this was the story.”

        http://tiny.cc/hsv4r

        The documentary made by Male TV telling people that there was no risk of them beeing washed away, which has been censored by the Male government. Why? International aid, more cash than they can shake a stick at, pouring in to their tiny country.

        We used to hear the wailing and howling about Kilimanjaro, how it was losing it’s white cap because of CO2, turns out it was nothing of the sort, but caused by deforestation and drought.

        Then we had the scandal of the melting glaciers in the Alps.

        http://tiny.cc/869nt

        So we can sneer at Piers Morgan, because we think he has no credibility as climate scientist or indeed qualifications. ( Unlike Gore or Pachauri .Whose only qualifications on climate is the alarmist hot air they expell.) However for some one to be able to consistently produce an 80% strike rate on weather predictions I think he knows a bit about the subject. A strike rate this is far superior to anything the Met Office produces.

        1. bellacaledonia says:

          To say that the movement working around climate change has become fascist is just a very sad stupid and pointless thing to say.

    3. bellacaledonia says:

      Duma is right, if you had to choose between the UN, all forms of government and peer reviewed science
      everywhere, or Piers Morgan, I know who to choose, every time.

  4. duma says:

    “To say that the movement working around climate change has become fascist is just a very sad stupid and pointless thing to say.”

    The antics of the Climategate scientists and their attempts at concealing the medieval warm period, and the higher CO2 levels than we have now, the lack of evidence of sea levels rising, the Maldives, Gores lies, the attempt at pouring scorn and ridicule on any one who mentions these things, as epitomised by your own response to me, suggests to me that there is a lot of truth in what I have said.

    (Fascism = any system or doctrine characterized by a belief in the supremacy of a particular way of viewing things. )

    A pretty fair assessment of the MMGW cult.

    Remember Y2K, the con that science would like us to forget.

    Remember how in the 70s we were all going to freeze to death.

    Even the sainted Stephen Hawkins admits now he got things wrong about the universe.

    Being open minded is not IMHO sad, stupid or pointless.

    1. It is what proper scientists do …. the way to test any theory is not to defend it against all comers – as some of the extreme wing of climate changers do – but to seek to destroy it which is what Darwin did with evolutionary theory.

      The more any theory stands up to peer reviewed attempts to destroy it, the more likely the theory represents (to the best of current knowledge) what is actually happening. This is not the case regarding the current climate change theory because it has now become politicised and vested with Government and Corporate money as ‘being the ultimate truth’ on the issue. The Climate theory is no longer a scientific theory but a ‘political theory’.

      All the scientific evidence demonstrates is the world is getting warmer. There are a number of possible theories which can explain this but again all scientific evidence shows the Earth’s warming and cooling to be a long standing climatic cycle.

      Recent evidence from NASA indicates that the current mathematical component of the ‘politicised climate theory’ may be three fold out in its assumption of how much heat Earth itself radiates into space. NASA’s calculations, based on staellite observations, indicates the amount of energy released into space could be as much as three times higher than the current theory states. The NASA data is currently being peer reviewed. If the NASA data holds up to scrutiny the statistical significance of the impact of the so called ‘green house gases’ is reduced exponentially.

      Currently Einstien’s Theory of Relativity is under the cosh with the apparent scientific observation that neutrinos can travel faster than light. it is an aberation
      (but the experiment has now been repeated by a different team with the same results), it proves the existence of extra dimensions (through which neutrinos can ‘hop’ giving the appearance of travelling faster than light) or the Theory of Relativity has more holes in it than a Gruyere cheese.

      Sorry Bella – to challenge any theory with experimental or observed evidence is the very opposite of fascism – it is how science (as opposed to politics) works.

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