I admit I was pretty incensed about Ahmadinejad and his request to visit the 9/11 ground zero site. To me that was only slightly less tacky then letting in Ladin do the same thing. 

Ahmadinejad raises some disturbing questions.  He supports the terrorists in Iraq with weapons and such, and he is clearly and directly responsible for the death of American Soldiers.  He is suspected of being involved in the hostage crisis in the 70’s, but even if that is just a pipe dream, he is still clearly an apparently evil force. And this is the guy who denies the holocaust and wants to bomb Israel into the next world.  And he is even trying to build the bomb to do it.

And as the leader of his country, he is here to address the UN, which like it or not we have to allow.

So along the way he gets an invite to Columbia University to speak.  And everyone went berk over it.

I can understand why, the decision to invite him was surely not a happy one, even at a liberal haven like Columbia.  Students and Alumni alike are livid.  And honestly I was expecting Columbia to make this into a softball game.  Ahmadinejad tends to align with some progressives and liberals in some of his anti Bush, anti War and anti American ravings.

But, while he did strike a few happy chords in his speech, he also raised more then a little ire. 

It started off harshly as the University President introduced him with a 20 minute slam lecture.  He attacked him for the more unpalatable elements of his policies, the treatment of women, the oppression of gays, the denial of the holocaust and a few others, even going as far as to call him a petty and cruel dictator.

Ironically, that last bit was really a misstep, as anyone who knows the power structure in Iran knows that Ahmadinejad is not the true power, he is the second man, and the mouthpiece of the Khamenei.

The battle between reason and hysteria continues unabated.  I hear daily the same tired misrepresentations, emotional appeals and useless calls for change.

The fact is that the truth has not really slowed the Man caused Global Warming Alarmists as much as it has caused the skeptics to fight a little harder for rationality before we spiral into a morass of knee jerk policies.

In gravely narrated special on TV yesterday the fact that China has passed us as the leading CO2 producer, and India is not long in joining them was mentioned.

You may recall that India and China were exempted from the Kyoto Treaty, and it was their exemption that caused Al Gore to note that the treaty was useless without their inclusion.

And now we see the result of that exemption, they have continued unabated to become the worlds leading befoulers.

Droughts world wide have been predicted with dire warnings, and hailed as proof of the warming, yet this study seems to say that droughts are a good thing:

Drought Makes Rain Forest Greener

Droughts, paradoxically, seem to make the verdant Amazon rainforest even greener, a new study suggests, giving scientists hope that global warming’s effects on the lush South American ecosystem won’t be quite as bad as has been predicted.

Many global climate models have predicted that Earth’s rising temperatures will cause intense drought in the Amazon basin, eventually leading to the rainforest’s collapse into grass-covered savanna, with only a sprinkling of trees.

A widespread drought hit the Amazon in 2005, becoming particularly intense during the regular dry season, which runs from July through September, and providing researchers with an opportunity to test the climate model predictions.

According to the models, a warming scenario would result in the forest being hit by drought. The trees would then respond by reducing both transpiration (the evaporation of water from parts of a plant, especially the leaves) and photosynthesis. This reaction would exacerbate the drought by reducing the amount of water entering the atmosphere, which in turn would reduce precipitation.