Morgan Kelly of UCD is one of the smartest economists I know. Unlike many academic economists, he has a great insight into the functioning or malfunctioning of the actual economy. Well before the Irish housing bust and financial crisis, he argued that there was going to be a huge correction (see here). He was right. Several days ago he spoke about the Irish economy to the UCD Economics Society. This is a brilliant talk on the past, present and future of the Irish economy.
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.