On the global warming front there is a paper out now titled "Trouble in the Climate-Model Paradise," published in CO2 Science. It is pretty esoteric, but apparently there is a mismatch in the amount of precipitation predicted by the Global Circulation Models and the amount actually measured. This is another case where the model's predictions don't match real data. The article talks about having to make wind velocity decrease to have the models match the data, but in reality there has been a wind velocity increase. The cataclysmic temperature increase due to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere occurs because of an increase in water vapor caused by the small temperature increase caused by the CO2 buildup (no one claims that CO2 alone would cause a large temperature increase.) The models have a buildup in water vapor in the atmosphere because precipitation rates do not go up as much as the water vapor increase. But, inreality that is not happening. Other studies on precipitation indicates the same thing. Most people probably don't understand the issue well enough to appreciate what this means, but scientists should. One reason that the proponents of the cataclysmic global warming hypothesis such as Mann, et al wanted to show that the earth is warmer than ever is because if the temperature were indeed warmer around 1000 AD than now, then a good question is why didn't the Earth's temperature runaway upward then? There was no good answer to that question, so it became important to show that temperature had never been so high in the past as it is now. The attempts to show that temperature was not as high as now have been pretty much discredited, but the supporters of the global warming hypothesis apparently remain unconvinced.