My colleague Gareth Campbell recently gave an interview on Share Radio about the railway mania. Gareth explains the role played by high dividends, uncalled capital and overexpansion in driving the boom and bust in railway shares. You can access the podcast at Gareth's Railway Mania website. Gareth has written several seminal papers on the railway mania. He and I have written several papers on the mania, looking at the role of shareholders, managers, and the media in the railway mania.
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.