Reply #49: you've just given me an idea!

[Lisa]

I was about to say how interesting (and encouraging) it is that people still find the seasonal celebrations so enjoyable, enough to flock to certain areas (compare to the sentiment that "watching the grass grow" is incredibly dull, which one hears on this side of the ocean a lot). And then I started to wonder ... what kinds of impacts might global warming have on the cultural tourism which depends on current climate conditions? Japan would be especially interesting to study. (It's part of North American customs too, though maybe not to such a large degree. Though I can recall that in my hometown, the scheduling of the Lilac Festival and the (maple) sugaring have been thrown into disarray by unpredictable weather in the past decade.)

I'll bet someone has done some work on this, though it didn't show up in the Canadian national impact study of a few years ago. Gee, it would be cool if I could wangle a trip to Japan out of this!