If you are the sort who likes to rummage through the grumblings of the sceptical ‘orc army’, you will be very familiar with a number of names that seem to crop up again and again. The current bête noire of preference seems to be Ed Milliband, but in the past there have been plenty of others over which an orc might choose to slobber. Take for example, the self-proclaimed ‘all-star team’, comprising professors Sander van der Linden, John Cook, Stephan Lewandowsky and Naomi Oreskes, all of whom have done their bit to promote the art of miscarriage. To that particular constellation you can add other, less-clustered climate alarmist luminaries, such as Joachim Schellnhuber and the one and only Michael Mann. But there is one other name that you won’t find mentioned nearly as often – which is perhaps surprising given the untold harm he has caused already. So let me see if I can now put that right.

The gentleman concerned is a certain Professor Nicholas F. Pidgeon, Professor of Environmental Psychology and Director of the Understanding Risk Research Group — a title that cannot help but attract the attention of a reprobate such as I. You can hear him in action here, taking part in an Oxford University podcast, and you can both see and hear him here, covering similar material whilst focusing on the UK’s National Risk Register. To see him in action you might wonder what all the fuss is about. He appears to know his stuff, as far as it goes; which admittedly isn’t that far in these particular presentations. At least he knew to point out that the most important risks are often the ones not on your register. He also seems to appreciate that deep uncertainty is best handled by making resilient decisions, by which I mean those designed to minimise regret. On the other hand, he does say that climate sceptics use uncertainty as an excuse to do nothing – proving to me that he has never bothered to properly engage with what climate sceptics actually say. But none of this would be enough for me to place him on a Wanted Dead or Alive poster. However…

Yes, however, there is such a thing as an organisation called Behavioural Research UK (BR-UK), and they are currently employing their stellar skills to investigate how behavioural insights can be used within a number of what they call ‘themes’, the first of which is ‘Environment & Sustainability’. If you look this theme up, you will find that Professor Pidgeon is one of the two leads, and you will also find the following introductory sentence describing what the theme is all about:

The world’s populations currently face existential threats of the closely connected climate and biodiversity crises, with people’s individual and collective patterns of behaviour at their heart.

Which rather invites an obvious question: Why is a much vaunted expert on risk describing climate change as an ‘existential threat’, even though the IPCC doesn’t? It’s serious enough, maybe, but ‘existential’ is not a word to be bandied about lightly. It certainly isn’t one ascribed to the climate-related risks identified in the UK’s National Risk Register, the subject of Pidgeon’s presentation to which I linked earlier. I’m sorry, but this isn’t a good look, and it rather raises the suspicion that we are here dealing with yet another so-called expert in risk who, upon closer inspection, is actually a psychologist who specialises in the psychology of risk perception and how it can be manipulated. I should have known when he started talking about the ‘social amplification of risk’.

But even if my suspicions are correct, surely this is still not enough for me to start printing that Wanted Dead or Alive poster. However…

Yes, however, there is such a thing as an organisation called the UK Climate Change Committee (CCC), and I think you will find that Professor Pidgeon has more than a little to do with its creation. Here is what the modestly titled Research Excellence Framework (REF) says on that subject:

Research led by the Cardiff School of Psychology first revealed a `governance trap’ hindering decisive long-term action by the UK government on climate change. Nick Pidgeon co-authored a Parliamentary Research Report that identified a solution to this problem, which was the creation of an independent expert Committee to advise the government of the day on long-term climate change targets and to evaluate progress. This recommendation was enshrined in the 2008 Climate Change Act, which formalised the scope and composition of the UK Climate Change Committee.

Now perhaps you can see the problem here. The REF goes on to explain:

The data synthesis conducted by the [Pidgeon led] Cardiff group and by the parliamentary inquiry team identified a series of constraints on government action. In particular, and despite good intentions and rhetoric, the UK government was failing to act decisively because it feared punishment at the ballot box if bold but unpopular long-term climate measures were adopted.

Just to ram the point home:

In the report of the APPCCG inquiry it was concluded that as a result of this neither citizens nor governments would act decisively without a significant restructuring of the UK’s institutional climate governance structures.

To summarise, the CCC was invented to overcome a ‘governance gap’ that existed because of the need to adhere to the principles of democracy. That’s not me saying that, it’s the APPCCG inquiry, instigated in response to the Cardiff School of Psychology research. The formula is very simple. Although Nick Pidgeon was not a sufficient cause of the CCC he was certainly a necessary one: With no Pidgeon there is no 2008 Climate Change Act. As the REF puts it:

The ability of the government to pass this legislation and take decisive action is a direct impact of the recommendations published by Pidgeon and his co-authors in their analysis and report for the APPCCG inquiry into cross-party consensus on climate change legislation.

It is bad enough that the CCC was set up specifically to overcome the ‘hindrance’ of the ‘ballot box’, but it is worse still that its anti-democratic intentions should have been made so explicit at the time. I say shame on all who went along with this egregious idea, but even more so, I question the sociologist-cum-psychologist-cum-risk expert who gave the parliament of the day the idea in the first place, before persuading them what a marvellous stunt it would be. Not that the Institute for Government needed any persuasion:

The Institute for Government has conducted a retrospective evaluation of the evolution of the 2008 Climate Change Act, and the setting up of the Climate Change Committee, as an exemplary case study of UK policy success.

So the next time you feel the need to vent your spleen with Ed, save a little of your orc slobber for the innocuous looking Professor Nicholas Pidgeon. He now has an MBE, awarded for his services to ‘climate change awareness and energy security policy’, but in light of the carnage the 2008 Climate Change Act is now wreaking, I can think of a far more appropriate recompense.