You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dear Editors,
It is required that Covington be responsible for giving a fair and accurate account in what she says about Weintrobe, S (2012) editor. Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. While she does outline some of the ideas in the book, there are places where she oversimplifies the argument and places where she runs the risk of putting forward ideas without giving the book's authors credit for them. Indeed she hardly mentions most of the 23 contributors.
Her understanding of the problem of climate change seems different from that of the book's authors and indeed different from the climate science community and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).1 This results in a slippage where the book and her review are not about the same subject.
For Covington, climate change encompasses human-induced factors but also changes to the climate occurring over millennia.2 For the book climate change3 means historically recent global warming brought about by the rise in CO2e4 emissions caused mainly by our use of fossil fuels, and its effects. This meaning of climate change is accepted by world science, the IPCC and the authors of the book. Climate change, unless acted upon right now, will have serious consequences for current and future generations. A chapter in the book on the science by climate scientist Stephan Harrison (2012) usefully distinguishes for a lay readership what scientists are more certain (in a scientific sense) about and what they are less certain about. They are more certain that human-caused global warming is happening and less certain about modelling its effects. So far, climate scientists have underestimated the effects.5 This may well be because they, like politicians and the rest of us, are tending to disavow the seriousness of climate change.6