Paul Mason has a nice article on how the on-going crisis has imbued many with a feeling of powerlessness. Crisis is the new state of economic being and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. We therefore become resigned to crises and increasing inequality. Mason raises interesting questions about the long-term consequences of powerlessness and he also alerts us to the dangers of powerlessness by pointing out how the rise of fascism, nationalism and Hitler quickly followed the crisis of the 1930s.
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.