Every year my Money and Banking class write blogs as part of their coursework. There was a tie this year for the top spot between Philip Ellis and Andrew Copeland. Philip's blog was a piece of analysis looking at the informal market in Vietnamese Dong. Andrew's blog looks at creative destruction in the context of bank failures and bailouts. In the runner-up spot was Claire Doran - her blog looked at the role of women in banking.
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.