DesScorp writes "Science News reports on a story which blames a centuries long cooling of Europe on the discovery of the new world. Scientists contend that the native depopulation and deforestation had a chilling effect on world-wide climate. 'Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University.' The story notes that the pandemics in the Americas were possibly an example of human climate manipulation predating the Industrial Revolution, though isotope measurements used during research have much uncertainty, so 'that evidence isn't conclusive.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University, was one of the central figures involved in the 'Climategate' controversy, which saw many private email conversations between researchers posted publicly. Now, an investigation (PDF) by the National Science Foundation has found "no basis to conclude that the emails were evidence of research misconduct or that they pointed to such evidence." Phil Plait points out that other investigations have found similarly that claims of Mann's misconduct took his statements out of context. 'A big claim by the deniers is that researchers were using "tricks" to falsify conclusions about global warming, but the NSF report is pretty clear that's not true. The most damning thing the investigators could muster was that there was "some concern" over the statistical methods used, but that's not scandalous at all; there's always some argument in science over methodology. The vague language of the report there indicates to me this isn't a big deal, or else they would've been specific. The big point is that the data were not faked.'"

After 14 years and over 15,000 stories posted, it's finally time for me to say Good-Bye to Slashdot. I created this place with my best friends in a run down house while still in college. Since then it has grown to be read by more than a million people, and has served Billions and Billions of Pages (yes, in my head I hear the voice). During my tenure I have done my best to keep Slashdot firmly grounded in its origins, but now it's time for someone else to come aboard and find the *future*. Personally I don't have any plans, but if you need to get ahold of me for any reason, you can find me as @cmdrtaco on twitter or Rob Malda on Google+. You could also update my mail address to be malda at cmdrtaco dot net. Hit the link below if you want to read some nostalgic saccharine crap that I need to get out of my system before I sign off for the last time.

Nominei and suraj.sun write in with news about a nationwide raid of Anonymous members. CBS reports that raids occurred in California, New Jersey, Florida, and New York. At least 12 arrests were made with 15 warrants executed. Surely this has nothing at all to do with their recent infiltration of a certain company.

theodp writes "Over at TechCrunch, Jon Bischke is troubled by the growing divide between Silicon Valley and unemployed America. While people who spend most of their days within a few blocks of tech start-up epicenters are enjoying a boom/bubble, the number of unemployed now eclipses 14 million nationwide, labor under-utilization is 16.2%, and the mean duration of unemployment has spiked to 40 weeks. 'Which bring us to an important question,' writes Bischke. 'Should Silicon Valley (and other tech clusters throughout the country) care? After all, as long as people in Nebraska or the Central Valley of California have enough money to buy virtual tractors to tend their crops in Farmville, should the tech community be worried about whether those same people are getting paid to do work in the real world? Is what's best for Silicon Valley also good for America?'"

Hugh Pickens writes "Former President Bill Clinton thinks 'every black roof in New York should be white; every roof in Chicago should be white; every roof in Little Rock should be white. Every flat tar-surface roof anywhere! In most of these places you could recover the cost of the paint and the labor in a week.' Noting that Mayor Bloomberg started a program to hire and train young people to paint New York's roofs white, Clinton says a big percentage of the kids have been able to parlay this simple work into higher-skilled training programs or energy-related retrofit jobs. The benefit: not only will 'cool roofs' lower the utility bill in every apartment house 10 to 20 percent, but it frees cash that can be spent to increase economic growth. Clinton presented this with fourteen additional ideas for growing the economy, saving energy, and attacking the jobs crisis."