Have you had your Al Gore moment yet?

Had Al Gore not acted like a condescending jerk in the presidential debates or had he been able to deliver the votes in his home state of Tennessee in 2000, George W. Bush would have been nothing more than a footnote on the national political landscape.

Instead … Well, we know the rest.

Of course, Gore resurfaced earlier this year with his blockbuster documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." His film did as much to politicize and polarize the debate over global warming as it did to shine light on the subject.

That being said, I recently had my first "Al Gore moment." It came while on our family vacation in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.

Those of you who have been there know that driving through the Rockies is like driving through an ever-changing flicker show of beautiful post cards. John Denver was right.

However, this year's majestic scenery in the Rockies is unique in a disturbing and tragic kind of way. That's because a mountain pine beetle infestation has destroyed 7.4 million trees on 1.5 million acres of national forest in the past 10 years. Everywhere you look, vistas that usually had been green with lush pine trees are turning to red with dead pine trees.

The culprit for the infestation, according to botanists, is global warming. It turns out that normal, icy cold Rocky Mountain winters do more than just create tasty runoff for Coor's beer. They also kill off the pine beetle larvae. But record warm temperatures in recent years have minimized the annual beetle kill-off, and droughts have weakened the trees' immune systems.

The final, terrible scene in this ecological horror story has yet to be played. Local residents in the Colorado towns of Granby and Grand Lake say it's just a matter of time before lightning or some other source creates a spark that will set off the worst forest fires the Rockies have seen in recorded history.

It's a terrible national disaster that is just waiting to happen, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Millions of acres of forest will be destroyed, leaving untold numbers of moose, elk, wolves, bears, eagles and other animals without their natural habitats. Not to mention the mountain resorts and villages in the fires' paths.

Now, it's debatable that mankind and our emissions have caused or have contributed to global warming. Rational people can have divergent viewpoints on that part of the discussion.

However, it is becoming abundantly clear that global warming IS happening, whether you like Al Gore or not. As someone whose carbon footprint more closely resembles Bob Lanier's than Mickey Rooney's, I am among those who must increasingly ask myself, "What, if anything, are we going to do about it?"