Another of Durkinism crumbles into dust

Durkinism (n.) 1. A spurious claim made on a misrepresentation of evidence. 2. A conscious or unconcious attempt at misleading through presenting false or incorrect information. The article was full of Durkinisms. (1)

Science has dealt another blow to the climate change deniers. Truly, I'm beginning to admire them for their pluck - no matter how often they are shown up to be incompetent, bought off by the oil industry or just plain wrong, the gamely keep on trying to argue that left is right and 2+2 =5.

The latest iceberg to crash into the Titanic of climate change denial comes in the form of a report from the Hadley Centre (2). It explodes one of the (many) bogus claims made by Richard Durkin in his response to his critics published in The Australian, recently.

In the article, he claimed that

To the utter dismay of the global warming lobby, the world does not appear
to be getting warmer. According to their own figures (from the UN-linked
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the temperature has been static or
slightly declining since 1998. (4)

I had a go at this claim (5), pointing out that Durkin ignores the running five year mean temprature, which has continued to rise overall, even if it hasn't reached the heights of the exceptional temprature recorded in 1998.

Now the scientists at the Hadley Centre have produced a ten year weather forecast. They factor in weather phenonum such as El Nino. They suggest

... at least half of the years between 2009 and 2014 are likely to exceed existing records.

However, the Hadley Centre researchers said that the influence of natural climatic variations were likely to dampen the effects of emissions from human activities between now and 2009.

But over the decade as a whole, they project the global average temperature in 2014 to be 0.3C warmer than 2004. (6)

My emphasis, obviously. The BBC doesn't go in for big chunky bold fonts in the middle of articles.

So, deniers, please don't waste breath pointing out that the Earth's temprature has peaked and is dropping away. It hasn't, according to sensible people who know what they are talking about. The over all warming is being masked by other factors, just as it was masked between the 1940s and 1970s, but it is still there.

1 - Sadly, this is not in the dictionary, yet.
2 - http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/
3 - "Up against the warming zealots," Martin Durkin in The Australian, July 21, 2007. (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22105154-30417,00.html)
4 - ibid.
5 - Right here: http://lefthandpalm.blogspot.com/2007/07/durkin-replies-to-his-critics.html
6 - "Ten-year climate model unveiled," unattributed BBC article, 9th of August, 2007. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6939347.stm)