Biggest evarrrrr
Ah yes, very good, the world melts and fries and burns thanks to global warming so the thing to do is keep building bigger cruise ships.
The world’s largest cruise ship is set to begin its maiden voyage Saturday as it gets underway from the Port of Miami.
Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, which runs nearly 1,200 feet from bow to stern, is leaving South Florida for its first seven-day island-hopping voyage through the tropics.
Great. Fabulous. It’s definitely worth speeding up warming that little bit for the sake of taking tourists “island-hopping” for a week.
“Icon of the Seas is the culmination of more than 50 years of dreaming, innovating and living our mission – to deliver the world’s best vacation experiences responsibly,” Royal Caribbean Group President and CEO Jason Liberty said earlier this week.
Responsibly? Where’s the responsibly in this situation?
The Icon of the Seas is divided into eight neighborhoods across 20 decks. The ship includes six waterslides, seven swimming pools, an ice-skating rink, a theater and more than 40 restaurants, bars and lounges. The ship can carry up to 7,600 passengers at maximum capacity, along with 2,350 crew members.
How much fuel does it use? How much carbon does it add?
Cruising is surging in popularity. Last year, passenger volume outpaced pre-pandemic numbers, and this year is expected to hit a new high of 36 million as spending on experiences has climbed 65% since 2019.
People enthusiastically eliminating their children’s futures.
Where’s a rogue wave when you need it?
While I am no coal shill, I am genuinely curious to find out where the line should be drawn. Lighting the candles on a kids’ birthday cake consumes some fossil carbon though not as much per person as is achieved by your average cruise liner; no doubt about that.
BUT: “Studies of ice cores from Antarctica, Greenland, cores samples derived from ocean sediments, and studies of glacial deposits found on land indicate that there may have been as many as 20 glaciation periods… during the last 3 million years” And the next one in the series may have started just as our Homo sapiens ancestors came to the conclusion, no doubt after much debate and discussion, that it might be worth giving civilisation a try.
So that kid’s birthday candles might just be stopping Glaciation #21 dead in its tracks.
During the last in the Pleistocene series, there were glaciers from the North Pole down to Central Park in New York. Still, looking on the bright side, New Yorkers would not have had to have spent a cent on refrigerators, deep freezes, etc.
https://geo.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Oceanography/Oceanography_101_(Miracosta)/09%3A_Ocean_Circulation/9.14%3A_Ice_Ages_of_the_Pleistocene_Epoch
My neighbour recently took a cruise with her sister, who’s apparently in poor health and not very mobile so that was the only practical kind of holiday they could take. I wonder if the surge in popularity is related to the surge in well-off adults with metabolic disorder and consequent poor mobility.
I found this article about the demographics of cruise passengers. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but it looks reasonable and consistent with what I have seen or heard about.
People take cruises because they enjoy them. I don’t find that strange.
The point about mobility in #3 I think is good; consider, too, that shorter distances are desirable for people with children in tow, and the proportion of passenger groups with kids is increasing. Cruises have a great deal of activities and resources for children. The ships are compact floating amusement parks.
Omar
There is good reason to think that without human activities the earth would now be cooling into the next glacial period. However, I think we are now greatly over compensating for that, and should replace fossil fuels with other energy sources such as nuclear. Maybe after a few millennia we *might* want to put some CO2 into the air at a modest rate.
I didn’t say anything about strange. What I’m talking about here is the blind selfishness and greed of creating massive new non-essential ways to add more carbon to the atmosphere. Enjoyment isn’t really a great reason to make climate change that bit more imminent and worse.