Both of the reports from the investigations by the "House of Commons Science and Technology Committee" and "Scientific Assessment Panel" exonerated Professor Jones and the CRU.

He acted within the UK FOI laws. All UK Government agencies act this way. If you make a FOI request at any level of UK government it will generally be rejected because under the FOI laws they can reject requests which cost too much to process. This means a government deparment can effectively refuse any FOI requests they choose.

This is a problem with the UK's transparency laws, and has no bearings on the credibility of any of the CRU research findings (In any case, this would be a problem with the University's protocol for the handling of FOI requests, not Professor Jones personally).

If you are accusing the CRU of scientific fraud, this is a very serious accusation, and you'd better have decent evidence to back up your claim; Not "They didn't respond to FOI requests."

Did you read the article that you linked to (and for that matter the original article that was linked in this slashdot article) ?
You are instigating the kind of political motivated persecution that both articles criticise.

From your article: "By equating controversial results with legal fraud, Mr. Cuccinelli demonstrates a dangerous disregard for scientific method and academic freedom. The remedy for unsatisfactory data or analysis is public criticism from peers and more data, not a politically tinged witch hunt or, worse, a civil penalty. Scientists and other academics inevitably will get things wrong, and they will use public funds in the process, because failure is as important to producing good scholarship as success."

Mann is being persecuted because he is pushing a view point that is politcally damaging to the republican Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who incidentally also seems to believe another consipracy theory that Obama was born in Kenya and has faked his birth certificate.

Jones has already been cleared of wrongdoing in investigations, but still gets death threats made against him made by people who do not like his results.

>> 1. Giant Batteries/ Flywheels/ Water storage hills

If you have a few million hybrid and electric cars on the road, there are your batteries.

Only about 25% would be driven at any point in time. The rest can sit there storing energy when the wind is blowing, and returning energy to the grid at peak times, earning money for their owners.

>> You do realize, they've been in decline for about the last 18k years, right? Since the last glacial period.

Quite the pedant. The GP poster wasn't talking about a very tiny decline.
No-one is trying to claim that the climate doesn't change. The problem is how quickly it is currently changing.

If the temperature had been increasing for the last 18k years as fast as it has risen for the last few decades, we'd currently be experiencing temperatures nearing the 300 degrees Celcius mark, and the glaciers would have long since melted.

It's not that brilliant.

It's just another version of the Playstation 2 EyeToy, which was released in 2003.

Look, the Ancient Romans wrote that England's weather was too cold and too wet to grow grapes for making wine.

I didn't post to argue about the Roman civilization's taste in wine, just to disprove the myth that England was some kind of dry, warm wine growing paradise during Roman times. There are plenty of other sources of temperature data in England to support this assertion.

So many urban myths quoted in a single paragraph, that's probably a new record ...

The Romans tried growing wine in England, but they failed, producing very poor quality wine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_from_the_United_Kingdom#Roman_to_19th_Century

England's wine industry is currently thriving due to global warming.

There has been cattle in Greenland for decades. New Scentist has a good article on this myth:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11644-climate-myths-it-was-warmer-during-the-medieval-period-with-vineyards-in-england.html

Even with this solar minimum, 2008 was the 7th hottest year on record, 2009 is predicted to the 4th hottest, and 2007 is around the 3rd hottest.

In this decade so far, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, were all warmer than any year in the 1990s except for 1998 (due to its extreme El Nino event), so that statement is an outright lie. 2009 is predicted to be around the 4th hottest year on record based on temperatures so far.

Here's a good image, graph and explaination of the state of the climate at the end of 2008 from NASA:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36699

It's not the controls, it's the lack of quality games by 3rd parties publishers.

The Wii has an excellent controller for FPS and RTS games, and I find it very hard to go back to using a normal controller after using the Wii-mote, as they're just so clumsy in comparison. It's just a pity that there are so few of these types of games being released.

(At least there's a few decent ones - The Conduit, Resident Evil 4, Metroid Prime, but that not many since for a console that's been out almost 3 years).

It's very hard to understand why there is such a reluctance to release games like this for the Wii, when Resident Evil 4 sold so many copies.

We've got so many sources of historical temperature data that even if one source is unreliable, you've got access to so many others.

Every tree, every sedimentary rock, every body of water with sediment at the bottom, every ice formation, has information on the historical temperatures in that region. You've also got many human temperature readings from a variety of sources.

When you have that much data, it's not hard to build up an accurate estimate of the historical temperature.

NASA knows about the 11 year solar cycle, and attributes 2008 being the coolest year since 2000 to this and the La Nina cycle:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36699

2008 was still the 10th warmest year on record, 2007 the second warmest. Even discounting the varying solar activity, there is still a strong underlying warming trend, and it's a big worry that the temperatures around the poles have increased so much.