Global Warming?

Global warming (or the allegation of it, at least) has implications for the tourism business. One of those implications is that you can now book passage on a ship that will take you on a trip through the fabled Northwest Passage, north of Canada. The ship is no ordinary ship – it's one of the most powerful ice-breakers on the planet, built in Russia for their northern ports.

So you book your trip, and you're traveling through the Northwest Passage. The ice is gone, thanks to global warming, right? Well...

What irony. I am a passenger on one of the most powerful icebreakers in the world, travelling through the Northwest Passage - which is supposed to become almost ice-free in a time of global warming, the next shipping route across the top of the world - and here we are, stuck in the ice, engines shut down, bridge deserted. Only time and tide can free us.

Maybe not – in this case, one of the world's most powerful icebreaker was held captive for a week. They're lucky it wasn't all winter! In many places in the Arctic this year, the ice cover is more extensive than has ever been recorded. This isn't getting much play in the lamestream media, I suppose because it doesn't fit the global warming storyline very well (it's kinda hard to see how global warming could create more ice.

You can read the whole thing here, and a good blog post about it here...