David Cameron's withdrawal from an EU-wide treaty to deal with the debt crisis was the right thing to do as the treaty on the table won't fix the crisis and threatened the position of the City as the world's premier financial market. However, it not leaves Britain as potentially the only member of the EU not to sign up to the deal. Consequently, Britain may be marginalised and full withdrawal (or ejection) from the EU may be just around the corner unless the Euro collapses first, which is becoming more likely every day. The treaty needed two things to save the euro - (a) the ability to have fiscal transfers to economies hit by demand shocks (e.g., the PIIGS) and (b) a change in the ECB's mandate, which would enable it to monetise the debt of EU sovereign states.
The Berkeley Earth Project , an independent study of global warming, has found that the earth has become a degree warmer over the past half century. However, the statistical uncertainty surrounding pre-1920 estimates makes it very hard to say much about long-term trends - click here for graph . This is one of my concerns with the global warming debate - we simply don't have trustworthy long-run data which looks at temperature changes over the last millennium (or two). My second concern with the global warming debate is that it is very hard to prove any sort of casual link between global warming and human activity. The scientists may be able to show correlation between global warming and our production of carbon dioxides etc., but correlation is not causation. My third concern with the debate is that those who are sceptical or agnostic are stereotyped as flat-earthers or intellectually-challenged crackpots. This only stifles debate and the progress of science itself.