As Bradshaw et al wrote in their groundbreaking 2001 work:

However, whilst numerous items are colloquially labelled as being ‘as useful as a chocolate teapot', there does not appear to be any objective standard for the usefulness, or indeed uselessness, of a chocolate teapot itself.

Building on that seminal work - and the labours of various Bishop Hill denizens in What if the slayers are right? - I here suggest an analogy for the 'big picture' of the global warming debate.

Sceptics have the job of preparing tea and scones for a world hungry for truth, as a credible alternative to the offering of the IPCC and alarmists. The tea stands for our view of the current situation, including future projections. The scones stand for the various policy prescriptions we have - such as making the tax regime on energy such that shale gas is in no way penalised against, say, wind farms - and our projections of how this will achieve the most positive outcome for the most people.

Note that it's not as simple as the tea representing science and the scones policy. One of the crucial teacups for those with limited time to take in all the nuances of the debate, for example, is the time series of deaths from extreme climate events since 1900. The tea also includes our incomplete knowledge of climate during the earth's 4 billion years or more of existence and the extraordinary stability it shows.

As seek to serve this complex refection the heart of my analogy is that the Slayers wish to substitute their chocolate teapot for the sturdy one of the conventional greenhouse effect with low sensitivity, as proposed by Richard Lindzen and the lukewarmers.

Although the scones are exactly the same in the two cases, the deficiencies of the chocolate teapot, as shown by the experiment of Bradshaw et al 2001, will cause hot water quickly to escape without making adequate tea pourable into the teacups, ruin the scones and probably scald those who have turned up to enjoy the meal.

Even the idea of substituting the chocolate teapot for the Lindzen GHE one is a disaster - especially the idea that this constitutes the key move in the debate eg AlecM this morning

So it's all about news management to keep government sweet and with that the funding whist they overcome the key problem, Houghton got some of the physics wrong.

Emphasis added. By arguing that this is the key problem we are offering the world a chocolate teapot. The consequences of the policies that will result from our loss of credibility will include massive scalding of the poorest. Bad idea.

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Comments please. All analogies are imperfect but this one is designed to include all parts of the 'big picture' that the Slayers are adamant they have cracked. Cracked is exactly right.

Thanks Big Oil and Martin.

If you are saying that predictions of CAGW would be better refuted with a correct understanding of physics than with the dragonslayers misconceptions, then I think you are right.

I am certainly saying that.

But it's a faith based system, and always has been, so refutations, correct or not, are largely irrelevant.

That's a great deal more difficult to answer so let me say the first thing that comes into my head! Here's a paragraph I re-read this week from A N Wilson in 2009:

I haven't mentioned morality, but one thing that finally put the tin hat on any aspirations to be an unbeliever was writing a book about the Wagner family and Nazi Germany, and realising how utterly incoherent were Hitler's neo-Darwinian ravings, and how potent was the opposition, much of it from Christians; paid for, not with clear intellectual victory, but in blood. Read Pastor Bonhoeffer's book Ethics, and ask yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct. Think of Bonhoeffer's serenity before he was hanged, even though he was in love and had everything to look forward to.

Naziism was also a faith-based system. Even though Bonhoeffer did not overcome it, I say better to live (and if necessary die) like him than even be thought to acquiesce. And although Bonhoeffer was also a man of faith he and his father (who, according to Michael Burleigh, brilliantly opposed the eugenics movement and outlived both his more famous son and the Nazi movement) used reason to oppose this craziness. We must eschew the slayers for that reason - and for the fact that we simply don't know how any such faith-based system collapses. But they always do. Faith in reason - if one is able to take in both David Hume and one of his greatest fans, Johann Georg Hamann - should do the trick.

Big Oil: thanks for the snooze button on a smoke alarm, of which I'd not heard, and which I think is particularly apt to our situation. We are trying to sound the alarm about the irrationality and bad effects of so-called global warming mitigation through various purported emission reduction schemes, many of which do not even reduce CO2 emissions and all of which are useless to do so unless there is worldwide agreement, and that benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. These are logically cast-iron arguments, based on the traditional GHE with low sensitivity, and in due course should attract the attention of policy makers who are idealists *. But then they hear someone from within the sceptic camp say - or seem to say - that all this is irrelevant, because the GHE itself is bunk. The bullshit alarm goes off, drowning out the genuine alarm that has been sounding as a result of our very good arguments. Or the snooze button has been hit - because bullshit tends to send people to sleep very quickly.

Note how in his fierce criticism of Lewandowsky on 8th September, Anatomy of the Lewandowsky Scam, Steve McIntyre makes essentially the same point.

Little noticed at the time was Lewandowsky’s caricature of what skeptics actually believe – a caricature clearly serving to dehumanize his targets. Consider that, for example, Richard Lindzen, the leading skeptic, unequivocally agrees that temperature had increased and that increased CO2 has contributed to the temperature. Lindzen disputes the estimated impact of doubled CO2, both on global temperature and on negative impacts. John Christy and Roy Spencer, two other leading skeptics, are the architects and developers of the satellite record. They regularly report temperature data showing an increase in global temperature since 1980, but like Lindzen, believe that climate sensitivity is less than assumed in IPCC models and that the negative impacts will be less than advertised by IPCC, WWF and Greenpeace The opinions of the most prominent bloggers regarded by warmists as “skeptical” (Anthony, Lucia, Andrew Montford, Jeff Id, myself) are more or less along these lines. Arguably even Joe Bast of Heartland. This does not preclude holding an opinion that the surface temperature indices of Phil Jones and Jim Hansen are biased somewhat warm. Christy and Spencer believe this, as does Lindzen. While I’ve not surveyed blog readers on the point, my guess is that most “denizens” of “skeptical” blogs hold similar opinions. This is not to say that there aren’t a few extreme skydragons who challenge whether CO2 has had an impact on global temperature, but my guess is that they make up only a very small percentage of readers of skeptical blogs.

If someone like Lewandowsky - or his allies - want to talk up the skydragons or slayers, that in itself is a reason to beware.

* On the possibility of policy makers who are idealists: I think the situation is indeed hopeless unless these sometimes exist. So that's another of the Reasons we're all doomed for some. But I look at Canada - I've just seen Chris M doing the same and agreed - and I say it ain't necessarily so. On a similar note, I think we might gain from discussing faith-based systems separately at some point. Thanks to Martin, TBYJ and others for their insightful points on this angle. Let's keep it here for now.

Professor Richard Lindzen said exactly the same thing, in effect, TBYJ, about those that deny the GHE, with Christopher Monkton nodding in the background, at the House of Commons on 22nd February last year. And note how Lindzen's presentation, because it avoided such confusing misdirection, made a convert of The Independent's parliamentary sketchwriter, Simon Carr, who penned Is catastrophic global warming, like the Millennium Bug, a mistake? the same day.

Lindzen calmly suggests that it would be a clever use of the alarmists' money to fund such efforts, as Monckton nods in the background. You'd still need some nutters who really believe what they're writing and hope it's the way to worldwide fame. That's where I'd leave it, unless a Climategate type of smoking gun appears. The bad effect is the same, and folks as trustworthy as Lewandowsky make hay out of it, that's what we know for sure.

Rhoda: thanks for the final statement but, even if it had been just for me, I could take it. :)

You're right that we can't expect to reach someone like Lewandowsky. That wasn't part of my thinking at all. But I think it's instructive to look carefully at how such people seek to influence those who are more open-minded. One could say the problem wasn't Goebbels but all the people he managed to persuade - and there were ways he did so. But there's no absolute proof in areas such as this.

This relates to the first thing Jiminy said on this thread:

I do not think CAGW will ever be falsified...

Well, neither was naziism falsified in that sense. As TBYJ rightly said, there are some who still believe. But the sight of the inside of the concentration camps was enough for most people to give it a miss in future. CAGW in particular and environmentalism in general, at the start of 21stC, is different from past isms, as Ben Pile has argued recently. I think it will vanish away to something very small but it will never totally disappear. And the final outcome does depend on our passion for truth and for humanity. I know that may sound quaint but it could be important. :)

Somebody needs, logically speaking, to refute every single idea that presents itself as a challenge to the GHE. In practice we don't all try to do that. We have to generalise. But I appreciate the points you make.