Two years ago, I left for a sabbatical at Harvard Business School. During my time at HBS, I spent many Friday afternoons at the famous Harvard economic history seminar. You can click here to read a recent article about the prospects for economic history at Harvard (hat tip - Ryan Kee). Economic and business history is also thriving at HBS - click here to learn more. Business history has significant place in the curriculum at HBS, with MBA students taking courses in business history and the history of capitalism. It is my firm belief that students in business schools need to have a better grounding in history if they are to understand capitalism.
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.