What would you say are the biggest threats to the tourist future of the Mediterranean?
If I had to make a list, my top three would be something like:
1. Terrorists on a fast boat from Libya (or similar) wreaking bloody murder on a tourist beach
2. Every last resort being swamped by migrants as a result of the EU’s ongoing inability to deal with the crisis.
3. Greece finally admitting that it’s bust and selling all its islands to the Chinese and the Russians, thus denying the rest of us access ever again to calamares, dolmades, souvlaki next to idyllic turquoise seas.
Then, somewhere further down the list, would come, at maybe
15. Global cooling. Solar inactivity making Sardinia and Corfu as chilly as Edinburgh, forcing us all to migrate southwards to the balmy climes of, maybe, the Sahara desert.
And possibly in there at about 2054, after alien invasion, bubonic plague and devastation by vast herds of ravening polar bears, you’d put, more as a joke for old time’s sake than anything…
2054. Global warming.
But I notice that the experts at the European Union disagree with this assessment. In a new EU-funded study called Time is of the essence: adaptation of tourism demand to climate change in Europe – we are told that by 2100 Southern Europe could become so unbearably hot that hardly anyone wants to holiday there any more. The Spanish economy alone could face losses of €5.6 billion a year, with the Southern Med generally losing about 0.45 per cent of GDP. Still, at least the Baltic States would be happy. Apparently the tourists would head there instead, adding around 0.32 per cent (wow! gotta admire that precision) to their GDP.
There is, you might have thought, an appropriate and proportionate response to reports like this. In the bin, straightaway. Then set fire to the bin. Trample the ashes. Then bury it all in a pit of quicklime, just to be sure no trace remains.
That, though, would be to reckon without the credulity and the eagerness-to-relay-any-quantity-of-eco-bollocks of the compliant liberal media. Especially, inevitably the Guardian.
The Guardian has been taking the new threat very seriously. So seriously that its correspondent actually got on the phone and began badgering travel agents to ask what contingency plans they had put together for this terrifying possibility.
Travel agencies the Guardian contacted declined to give details of their preparations for climate disruption in the years ahead.
I expect it was because they just wanted to keep such sensitive contingency plans secret, right?
Undeterred, the journalist kept prodding. Surely someone could be found to take this nonsense seriously?
But a spokesman for Thomas Cook said the company “considers a range of potential factors in its long-term planning, and these include climate change and whether or not it could have an impact on its business model”.
Other operators said terrorism was currently viewed as a bigger threat to Mediterranean tourism, but that climate concerns were being closely followed.
“This is our livelihood and of course we will lose our jobs if no one can go skiing in Europe any more because of climate change,” a spokeswoman for Thomson Ski Holidays told the Guardian. “We are fully aware of the threat of climate change and doing our utmost to counterbalance it.”
Then at last: bingo! (Well sort of)
Nikki White, the head of destinations and sustainability at the Association of British Travel Agents (Abta), declined to comment on the report but said the industry was working to mitigate the damaging effects of tourism on the environment through schemes such as Travelife certification.
“The scheme, which was developed by Abta, helps hotels improve how they manage their environmental and social impacts, such as reducing their energy or water consumption, and ensuring they support the needs of local people, businesses and culture,” she said.
Am I being cynical here or do you get the impression that none of these people or organisations (save, obviously, that eager reporter from the Guardian) believes remotely in the Climate Change Fairy any more. But they feel they have to pay lip service to her existence, nonetheless, because custom and form require it.
It’s stories like this which remind you of just how desperate the climate alarmist camp is becoming in the run up to the UN’s Paris climate conference in December, increasingly aware as they are that there is next to no scientific evidence anywhere to back up their doomsday predictions of catastrophic man-made global warming.
So desperate are they, in fact, that they’re even resorting to saying stuff that is the exact opposite of true, like this recent headline in the Observer (the Guardian‘s Sunday sister paper).
Would you guess from that headline that Greenland’s ice sheet was experiencing some kind of melting crisis due to global warming?
Well if you did, you’d have been misled. In fact, as Tony Heller reports here, the melt season has ended a month early and Greenland’s surface has gained over 200 billion tons of ice in the past year.
Now what is it called when newspapers publish stuff that is the opposite of true just to pander to the prejudices of their readership? Whatever it is, it ain’t journalism.