It's past 2 a.m. and I'm still up- a little wired from some server upgrades and after-hours server failover configuration and testing for one of our clients.

So, to procrastinate sleep some more, I did some web surfing- went over and visited my good friend Pete Ashdown's website to see how things were going on there and read up on some of his policy statements on various issues.

In his most recent blog entry, Pete tackles the controversial topic of global warming. He mentions his recollection of how winters were "packed with deep snow" when he was growing up in Bountiful and how, it seems, it just doesn't get that way anymore.

We, as humans, have a tendency to always extrapolate historical information from our relative perspective -- that is, history that begins when we were born and is defined by our lifetime. Sure, I remember heavy snowfall when I was a kid too. It snowed like hell on my 12th birthday on 26 April 1984, forcing us to hold our Jump-A-Thon indoors at my elementary school.

I also remember being lectured in school about "global cooling" back then -- how I could possibly see the beginning of a new ice age in my lifetime, the way things were going.

The snow on 28 Jan 2002

I also remember a storm that swept through Cache Valley on 28 January 2002 that dumped nearly three feet of snow on us in 24 hours. Damn, it must be getting too hot on this planet!

I guess I just think I'm smart enough to realize my limited time on this planet doesn't really give me the experience or the expertise to make substantive observations about climate change. Additionally, I'm sensitive to the use of alleged climate change as a political vehicle. It's just a sign of poor judgement.

I also think Al Gore is an idiot.

I'm not "pro" or "anti" global warming. I feel we should be aware of the things that we as humans may do to affect the environment, but we should also be mindful of the scale of things. We should remember we are just humans and compared to the earth, the climate, and the universe, we may be as irrelevant as six billion ants would be to a major metropolitan city. Even six billion ants could probably coexist in Los Angeles without causing a noticeable effect on anything other than making the city look a little creepy at times. The effect we have on the planet is probably similar.

Oh, and then there's this story. National Geographic News, one of the world's leading sources of "scientific rhetoric" about man's negative effect on the environment reports Duke University researchers may have scientific evidence the Earth's climate isn't as sensitive as believed. Interesting!

And, if there is, in fact, some sort of real global warming happening, maybe we should spend our time and resources trying to develop gigantic corks to use to plug up volcanoes and other geothermal events which spew many times more pollutants, heat, and "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere than all the combustion engines in the history of combustion engines could.

So, the bottom line, I guess, is that, Pete, I love you, man, but I gotta call you on this one. I think you're wrong.