Forget that flight to Hawaii to join legendary American Olympic skier Bill Koch for some beach skiing. Climate change has delivered the experience to Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, and you won't even have to make do with wet sand. The white snow beaches of Kenai Lake beckon.

Who says global warming has to be all bad?

OK, Al Gore, but he's on a doomsday kick. Granted, change of any kind is a difficult thing. Gore and some others on the left seem to get in as much of a tizzy about climate change as Sarah Palin and some on the right do about culture change. One group sees society on the verge of collapse because the seasons appear to be shifting; the other sees the approach of the apocalypse because June Cleaver has gone missing from the kitchen, making room for mothers like Clair Huxtable and Angie Lopez to move in.

Both sides seem to have forgotten change is inevitable for better or worse -- or for neither, really.

Not to dismiss the need for global energy conservation -- the way humans waste fuel now and, in the process, pump carbon dioxide waste into the atmosphere is unconscionable -- but the global climate, like global cultures, has been constantly changing since The Big Bang. And I, for one, will happily take a shift toward warm in Alaska over a slide in the other direction. I've done my time at 50 degrees below zero. It's not that much fun.

I don't know about you, but I can see something worse than glaciers shrinking, and that would be glaciers growing. The U.S. Forest Service now frets about Portage Glacier retreating out of sight of the Begich-Boggs Visitor Center. Just think how the agency would be fretting if the glacier was on the march toward that multi-million dollar facility. Can you say, "crushed like an egg?"

So maybe a little warming in Alaska isn't so bad.

It is worth keeping in mind that it has happened before. All that Prudhoe Bay oil would be non-existent if not for the warmth of the Arctic environment an estimated 65 million to 145 million years ago. That's when the dinosaurs roamed the North Slope if you believe the conclusions of the scientists and the prehistoric remains that have been dug up.

British geologist Michael Benton and others have blamed ancient, carbon-dioxide-spewing volcanoes from tens of millions of years ago for making the now-inhospitable Slope a once hospitable place. Based on what can be garnered from knowledge of the remains of ancient vegetation from the Slope, scientists reckon that winter there in the Cretaceous Period lasted only three months, with a mean temperature of about 12 degrees. Winter on the Slope now lasts seven to eight months -- two to three times as long -- with a mean temperature closer to minus-10 to minus-15 degrees.

Or at least that's the norm of the moment. As probably most everyone knows, the Slope is now warming again. Arctic Sea ice is shrinking. There is talk of the fabled Northwest Passage around the top of North America soon opening.

Scientists this time blame carbon dioxide spewing out of industrial smokestacks, homes (which actually leak more of the so-called greenhouse gas into the atmosphere than motor vehicles), and of course Hummers, four-wheel-drive pickup trucks, snowmachines, and all other sorts of politically incorrect machinery powered by the internal-combustion engine.