Ever since Bill Clinton's campaign strategist coined the phrase in 1992, "it's the economy, stupid", politicians and commentators have believed that the economy is the most important issue for voters when it comes to general elections. Click here to read a wonderful piece by Roger Scruton in The Guardian which argues that true conservatives are driven by more than economics, and that the current divisions in the Tory party need to be looked at through this prism.
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.