The Great Barrier Reef represents the great beauty endangered by climate change.

It was with a muddy mixture of sadness, selfishness and guilt that I read CNN.com’s piece this weekabout the top five places on earth to see before “global warming messes them up.”

The targeted locations — Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, New Orleans, Rocky Mountain National Park, Switzerland’s Alpine Glaciers and the Amazon rain forest — all face degradation in the near term and destruction in the long term due to rising global temperatures.

We are often warned about the impending effects of climate change in terms of very practical disaster — lost homes, lost crops, lost lives. But I appreciated taking a moment to ponder the beauty that will be lost too. My children may not get the chance to take in the breathtaking variety of a coral reef as I have. I know they will not experience the same New Orleans I visited; the Ninth Ward tavern where we ate crawfish has likely been torn down or gutted.

That’s the sadness. My selfish reaction is the one that drives me to get on the stick and see all these sights before I can’t.

The article acknowledges this irony — if you hop on a plane to tour one or more of these endangered natural wonders, you’re just contributing to the problem by burning jet fuel. And that reminds me of another sad possibility in our lifetimes: That the relatively free range of travel we’ve enjoyed will be unavailable due to fuel shortages or restrictions necessary to stem global warming. Even if we manage to save the rainforest, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere may never have the freedom to go see it that we have now.

To say such changes would affect the travel industry is the understatement of the year. Will there even be a travel industry in 2050?

The guilt in my reaction is to be contemplating my future vacation opportunities when I am part of the privileged world that is creating global warming. The most immediate and extreme suffering will hit those who did the least to contribute to the problem — the poor, unindustrialized inhabitants of tropical islands and coastal fishing communities. But I think this article is a reminder that sooner or later, if its causes are not stemmed, global warming will hit us all — even those of us who are privileged enough to look at a rain forest or a beautiful stretch of coastline as a source of pleasure and not sustenance.

Photo by Leonard Low, used via Creative Commons license.