Two of the highlights of my job are teaching MSc students and the supervision of PhD students (click here), who have typically come from an MSc course. One of the problems facing British universities is that there is inadequate funding for students to undertake taught postgraduate courses as well as PhDs. There is no systematic funding of postgraduate study as there is with undergraduate degrees, with the result that many bright but poor students are unable to take taught postgraduate courses or do a PhD. In addition, there is a real fear that those who are now paying up to £9,000 fees per annum will not have the appetite or ability to fund postgraduate study whenever they graduate in 2014/15, which deprives the UK of highly-trained specialists and future academics. You can read more about this impending crisis and funding gap here.
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.