Those of you who flatter yourself as being something of a connoisseur of the climate sceptic bashing academic will be very familiar with the name Sander van der Linden. He is described in his LinkedIn entry as a Professor of Social Psychology at University of Cambridge, and as the author of the book, “FOOLPROOF: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity“. If that title conjures up thoughts of John Cook and his promotion of the idea of ‘vaccination’ against misinformation, then you would be right; the two have worked together and should be thought of as intellectual stablemates. You are welcome to consult Sander’s laudation on LinkedIn, but all you really need to know is that, like Cook, his academic stature is well-established; and, like Cook, his stature poorly reflects the standard of his work. I say this, not because it is the sort of jibe you might expect from one of the climate sceptic ne’er-do-wells, towards which van der Linden’s research into cognitively challenged conspiracy theorists was aimed; it is because I have actually taken a close look at some of his work. In particular, I have read his paper, “On the relationship between personal experience, affect and risk perception: The case of climate change”. Allow me to share some thoughts with you.

It is often the case that alarm bells start to ring even after only having read a paper’s introduction, since it is here that an author lays down the basic ideas upon which their paper is founded. Get these wrong, and there is little chance that the remainder of the paper will come to your rescue. In van der Linden’s case, it is his opening statement that sounds the alarm:

A “risk” is not something that exists “out there”, independent of our minds and culture (Slovic, 1992, p. 119). Indeed, unlike a physical threat or danger, the human notion of risk is a mental construct (Sjöberg, 1979), it cannot be sensed—it is only perceived (Fischhoff, Slovic, & Lichtenstein, 1983).

It’s an opening statement that appears to be well backed up by citations, but I am prepared to bet that Slovic, Sjöberg, Fischoff and Lichtenstein are all fellow psychologists. The fact that they are making so much of risk being a ‘mental construct’, that can only be perceived, is because such a framing reduces risk management to lttle more than a matter of psychology, and the psychologist’s contributions are therefore not just helpful but quite sufficient. In fact, what we are seeing here is a classic case of déformation professionnelle: when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

If you were to ask a risk management professional, rather than a psychologist, for a precis of the conceptual framework for ‘risk’, he or she would tell you that there is a distinction to be made between risk and the perception of risk. They would readily concede that there is much that psychologists can usefully say regarding such perception but, mark my words, they would never reduce risk to being no more than a ‘mental construct’. They would also readily concede that the concept of risk is only meaningful when seen in the context of the values of one or more stakeholders, and so subjectivity is ever-present. But mark my words, they would never say that risk is not ‘out there’ and would never reduce risk to being something that ‘cannot be sensed’. So the problem with the van der Linden paper is that someone who clearly lacks the required professional background is about to embark on a discourse of risk management that has very shaky foundations indeed. Let’s see how that pans out.

Sander continues by pointing out that ‘climate change is mostly a statistical concept…and as such, it cannot be experienced directly’. This, he believes makes climate change ‘relatively unique…in the sense that it is not directly “situated” in our daily environment’. This may be true, but there is also another aspect of climate change that he completely overlooks. Climate change science is mostly a complicated subject and, as such cannot be understood directly by the vast majority of lay people. It is also in that sense that it is ‘not directly “situated” in our daily environment’. I will come back to this important point later.

It is the indirectness of climate risk that van der Linden then explores in his paper, and in so doing he tries to answer a number of questions that only a psychologist could find interesting:

Taken together, these research findings raise a number of important and unresolved questions about the relationship between personal experience, affect, and risk perception: does personal experience with extreme weather predict affective judgments? And in turn, do these affective judgments guide public risk perceptions of climate change? Or does personal experience predict risk perception, and in turn, does risk perception predict affect? Alternatively, is it possible that personal experience predicts risk perception and that risk perception and affect simultaneously and reciprocally influence each other?

To appreciate my concerns, you don’t need to read the paper in full to see what answers he comes up with. All you need to note is that it is ‘personal experience with extreme weather’, and affect (the experience of feeling or emotion), that lie at the root of the matter, and so any technique that can establish the right affect in an individual, despite the absence of any personal experience of extreme weather, is a valid technique for setting the correct level of risk, i.e. the correct mental state to be in. To see how this works, we need to fast-forward to the paper’s conclusions. Under the subtitle, ‘Implications for Risk Communication’, van der Linden writes:

The practical value of this research is evident in that risk perception, and the experiential system in general has been implicated as an important determinant of actions to help reduce climate change (e.g., O’Connor et al., 1999; Leiserowitz, 2006; Marx et al., 2007; Semenza et al., 2008; Spence et al., 2011). Results of this study suggest that in order to design effective social-psychological interventions, risk communication messages should take into account the interrelated nature of personal experience, affect, and risk perception and the way in which these variables shape perceptions of and beliefs about climate change. Indeed, the interactive engagement of both cognitive and emotional processing mechanisms is key to fostering more public involvement with climate change. [My emphasis]

And just to labour the point, van der Linden adds that ‘risk communication campaigns should try to emphasize the association between more frequent extreme weather events and climate change’. Is that because he thinks it is necessary in order for us to correctly sense the risk? Absolutely not. As van der Linden claims in his introduction, risk is a mental concept and does not have an objective existence that can be sensed. On the contrary, as far as van der Linden is concerned, it is all about forming an association in order to establish the right affect, because, as van der Linden goes on to explain, ‘once this link is made salient, a mutually reinforcing relationship between risk perception and affect is established’.

Let me put that into plain language for you: You can promote cognitive awareness until you’re blue in the face but you will never get anywhere until the required level of fear has been established. And how might that be achieved? How about a relentless ‘communication’ campaign that places extreme weather centre stage? But don’t bother mentioning the statistics because they cannot be ‘experienced directly’. Instead, just tell stories that make the viewer respond emotionally.

My question in all of this is this: If risk is a ‘mental construct’ that is not ‘out there’ to be objectively sensed, but only psychologically perceived, then what would be the basis for determining the appropriate level of affect for us all to share? Is it van der Linden’s risk perception that we should be calibrated to? Perhaps it should be mine, or maybe yours. Or is it the scientists’? In van der Linden’s thinking, Net Zero is a proposed solution for a given perception of risk, but who is to say it is the correct perception? As I have pointed out earlier, most of us, including van der Linden, do not have the details of climate science ‘directly “situated” in our daily environment’. So is it the science or someone’s affect when listening to the scientists that matters? By using a definition of risk level that excludes the possibility of objective verification (to be replaced instead with validation by appeal to authority), he actually denies the possibility of an objectively verifiable, correct determination of society’s exposure to risk.

Yes, there are the climate statistics, but why should scientists, who are just as prone to cognitive bias as the rest of us, be granted free reign to use those statistics to set the mood music and dictate the values? Are climate scientists who say they fear for their children’s future really that reliable as arbiters of risk perception? More to the point, why should the likes of van der Linden, or any other lay person, be allowed to say which mood-setting scientist should be listened to and which should not? He says that establishing affect is ‘key to fostering more public involvement with climate change’, but he fails to establish why more involvement would be appropriate, because he can’t do so without getting bogged down in arguments over who’s perception is valid. Mantra’s such as ‘the science is settled’ are not relevant because we are not talking about science, we are talking about risk, and the appropriate perceptions and risk appetites are far from settled.

Of course, if the likes of the IPCC had sought advice from true experts in risk management rather than psychologists, such as van der Linden, then we wouldn’t be in this mess. Psychological manipulation wouldn’t be so important when establishing policy, because actual risk levels, established using actual risk analysis, would be more relevant than inculcated mental states. And risk management wouldn’t be seen as an exercise in establishing acceptable perceptions, it would be an exercise in establishing correct actions. Perhaps then it might finally be recognised that climate change is a quintessentially wicked problem for which Net Zero is not a solution. I think we should all rue the day when academics such as van der Linden decided to muscle in on matters of practical importance just because they wanted to feed at the climate change trough.