The only example of a successful prediction in your article is a rise in "mean surface temperature" which as I mentioned in the grand-parent is not hard to fudge

Your evidence that the weights used to calculate mean surface temperature are fudged in favor of global warming is a link to the "VERY ARTIFICIAL correction" in the CRU code. But that correction was not applied to global mean surface temperature data. It was applied to historical tree-ring data in order to account for the discrepancy between recent temperatures calculated using tree-ring data and recent temperatures calculated using other means known to be more reliable.

Uncorrected, the tree ring data suggests a decline in temperatures beginning around 1940 and continuing to the present. We have plenty of evidence that this is not in fact correct from actual thermometer-based records, so the correction was applied as a proxy for the unknown cause of this recent divergence. Now this does perhaps "hide" the fact that tree-ring records are not trustworthy (although CRU published papers explicitly mentioning this supposedly hidden fact), but it does not show that actual thermometer-based temperature records are being artificially tampered with to produce global warming.

It seems to me that ESR misrepresents this fact (although perhaps he was unaware of it) when he characterizes the "correction" as being applied to "Northern Hemisphere temperatures and reconstructions", with no mention of tree rings.

And I am very skeptical that temperature records over a very recent decade (the basis for the article I linked) have had significant external weighting applied to them to "fudge the results". The problem of changing station locations may necessitate differential weighting over longer time frames, but just from 2002 to 2011? I don't believe you. If you have any evidence suggesting that this is what is going on, I'm interested to see it.

The rest of said article reads like an attempt to (preemptively?) explain away failed predictions.

It doesn't read that way to me.

And yet for some reason all said predictions fail in the same direction.

Probably due to politically motivated reasoning. I'm not denying that climate change activists often make exaggerated and unwise predictions about the impact of climate change, especially in the popular media. I am denying your claim that the predictive record of climate science is entirely negative. There are climate models that have done pretty well, at least when it comes to global trends.

Regarding the wine point, it is doubtful if wine grapes ever grew in Newfoundland, as the Norse term "Vinland" may well refer to a larger area. From the Wikipedia article:

the southernmost limit of the Norse exploration remains a subject of intense speculation. Samuel Eliot Morison (1971) suggested the southern part of Newfoundland; Erik Wahlgren (1986) Miramichi Bay in New Brunswick; and Icelandic climate specialist Pall Bergthorsson (1997) proposed New York City.[26] The insistence in all the main historical sources that grapes were found in Vinland suggests that the explorers ventured at least to the south side of the St. Lawrence River, as Jacques Cartier did 500 years later, finding both wild vines and nut trees.[27] Three butternuts were a further important find at L'Anse Aux Meadows: another species which grows only as far north as the St. Lawrence

Also, wine grapes certainly do grow in England these days (not just in the Medieval period). There appear to be around 400 vineyards in England currently.

Reading your referenced article (Independent 2000):

Heavy snow will return occasionally, says Dr Viner, but when it does we will be unprepared. "We're really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time," he said.

Clearly the Climatic Research Unit was not predicting no more snow in Britain by 2014.

Regarding the alleged "West Side Highway underwater" prediction, see Skeptical Science. It appears Hansen's original prediction timeframe was 40 years not 20 years, and conditional on a doubling of CO2 by then.

As for the argument in the linked comic, when wine grapes can be grown in England and Newfoundland, as was the case during the medieval warm period I'll start taking arguments of that type seriously.

I notice you're shifting your hypothesis from ‘it's not getting any warmer than in the 1990s’ to ‘it's still not as warm as it was in the 1000s’. ;-)