Yesterday I had the privilege of giving a talk on my book Banking in Crisis to a packed audience at the Bank of England. The Bank has always taken banking history seriously. For example, it has commissioned several histories over the past 70 years - the most recent being Forrest Capie's Bank of England. The Bank is also holding a series of roundtables on past banking crises. I attended the first one of these yesterday, which was on the City of Glasgow crash. Charles Goodhart, Forrest Capie and I sat as external contributors to the roundtable and we were very impressed by the work done by the four economists who spoke about the City of Glasgow crisis.
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.