What happens when a country's banking system shuts down? Ben Norman and Peter Zimmerman at Bank Underground (a blog written by Bank of England staff) answer this question by looking at the industrial dispute which hit the Irish banking system in May 1970 and lasted for about six months - click here to read their post. The closure of the banking system meant that cheques could not be cleared. So what happened? Irish people still wrote cheques and retailers (and publicans!) accepted cheques, playing a very important role in keeping the Irish economy going. There is little evidence that the strike had a detrimental effect on retail sales or the economy. However, when the strike ended, some cheques did bounce and retailers and publicans did suffer some losses. Subsequently, when there was a strike in 1976, retailers etc were more cautious about accepting cheques. One publican said that "when the banks start serving booze, we will start cashing cheques"! Maybe the publicans would have done a better job than the bankers in the run-up to 2008!
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.