Iain Mansfield, a member of the British diplomatic service in Manila, was the winner of the IEA's Brexit prize. His prize-winning essay, which can be accessed here, argues that Britain's exit from the EU should be used as an opportunity to embrace free-trade agreements with other major trading nations. Guardian coverage is here and a Daily Telegraph story on how Mansfield was silenced by the Foreign Office can be found here. Of course, the great irony was that the prize money was paid in euros!
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.