There are those in our country who are so dehydrated, so permanently overbaked, that their powers of reasoning are inoperable. Those are the folks who seem to feel that climate change is just another wide-eyed theory, sort of like evolution.
But as I write this in Chicago, it is 101 degrees on the other side of my window. The National Climate Data Center has just announced that the first six months of 2012 were the hottest ever recorded. And it isn't that we are beating the record by a little bit: So far this year, our average temperatures are up 4.5 degrees above the average for this century.
I had breakfast the other day at a rural breakfast joint not far from my home. The local farmers were sitting around the big communal table talking about the heat- and drought-induced corn crop loss. Within the space of 20 minutes of slowly sipping my decaf at a table nearby, I picked up the fact that they were facing minimal losses of "at least 50%."
In some sections of the Midwest, that figure is higher. The conversation had a lot to do with plowing the remaining crop under and replanting soybeans.
But these conversations are not limited to the U.S. The summer heat is a huge story in Europe. Returning cruise ship passengers are talking about disembarking in Rome, Barcelona, Venice and Dubrovnik and entering a hot zone that can "make you soaking wet before you have walked a block," as one Dallas matron described it to me.
I've noticed that the number of clients who can walk around ports for an entire day seems to be shrinking. Not even Michelangelo's "David" can compete with the cool air of a cruise ship, a hotel lobby or a local bar when the temps soar above 90 and the air is laced with layers of humidity.
There have been a great many event cancellations due to the weather throughout the U.S. Washington was brought to its knees when horrific thunderstorms knocked out the local power grid for several days. Of course, that meant that much of Washington couldn't get to work, a fact greeted with joy in about 50% of the voting precincts in the country.
Travelers were directly affected by the heat. Flights out of Washington's Reagan National Airport experienced heat-related cancellations made necessary because the tarmac was melting in the broiling sun, trapping the tires of aircraft attempting to move to the runway.
In 1994, I found a wonderful little book that listed temperatures and rainfall for locations around the world. I always kept it on my desk, and I would frequently offer clients rather exact predictions about average temps and anticipated rainfall during their travels. This was particularly useful when speaking about the Serengeti Plain or the Galapagos Islands. I became a global weatherman.
But then I began to notice that my little book was no longer useful. The kinds of summer temperatures I was seeing in Rome were significantly higher than the notations in my weather bible. Things were changing.
I could still keep up with the hottest tapas locations in Madrid, and I still knew the names of the best guides in Moscow, but there was no way I could keep up with the world's weather. Climate change (by whatever name you prefer to call it) is happening so fast, and with such out-of-the-ordinary regularity, that counseling clients on the specifics of the weather they can expect to encounter has become a challenge of immense proportions.
Over the past 50 years or so, we've experienced a real balance of record-setting low temperatures and record-setting high temperatures. It all worked out to an average where nothing really changed. Vacationers knew what Santa Barbara would be like in June and what kind of weather they could expect in Brooklyn come November.
But in the last 10 years, record highs have been recorded twice as often as record lows. And it seems as though everything accelerated this year. For the first six months of 2012, the numbers are running 10:1 in favor of record highs.
Now lest you think this is starting to read like an Al Gore movie, I want you to know that I am in contact virtually every day of my life with clients who think that global warming is some kind of hoax formulated by ... well, that doesn't really matter. What does matter is that every single adventure tour operator I know has real concerns about the amount of heat-trapping gases, led by carbon dioxide, that are being launched into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels worldwide.
Every single cruise liner, jumbo jet and rental car adds directly to the accumulation of massive levels of CO2 threatening some of our most beautiful adventure travel destinations. The world's cities are dying a slower form of environmental decline, but the changes are palatable enough to affect living patterns in any number of European cities hit with increasingly stifling summer heat waves.
Of course, this isn't new information. In 2005, a report titled "Modeling the Impact of Climate Extremes" shook up large portions of the European population. Prepared by the respected Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University, the report was three years in the making and involved leading scientists from eight European nations who looked at the impact of changing weather patterns on various business sectors over the next 80 years.
Their conclusions? Spaniards will be sunning themselves on British beaches because Barcelona will be too hot. Greeks will be heading down the Rhine to avoid prolonged drought and reduced rainfall in much of Southern Europe.
The report talked about snow depths decreasing by 20% to 30% in the southern Alps, affecting winter sports holidays. Summer Mediterranean holidays will decline, and more and more Europeans will begin taking their annual holiday in the spring. Paris will, effectively, shut down in August because it will be too warm for residents or visitors to venture outside.
I think I will plan a visit to Paris in August 2020. Prices will be rock bottom, and besides, most of everything I remember loving about the city is indoors. But I fear I might find myself the only tourist on the second floor of the Louvre.
Contributing editor Richard Turen owns Churchill and Turen, a vacation-planning firm that has been named to Conde Nast Traveler's list of the World's Top Travel Specialists since the list began. Contact him at rturen@travelweekly.com.