As I write this post, I'm sitting in a coffee shop waiting to speak to a group of senior bankers at Ulster Bank about what we can learn from the history of financial crises. The four lessons I will be sharing with them are: (1) the 2008 crisis is totally different from anything that has come before in terms of its scale and scope; (2) if bankers aren't properly incentivised, they will take on too much risk; (3) asset markets can reverse, but this is only a concern if the assets are financed via debt; and (4) politics matters - crises ultimately have a political root.
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.