The Times podcast: Masters of Disasters: Broken records! How the Trump administration’s climate push has created a new kind of disaster
This week on The Times podcast we were pleased to welcome Anthony Watts, a senior fellow at the Global Warming Policy Foundation, to discuss how the Trump administration’s climate change agenda has created a new kind of disaster.
His book of the same title, Masters of Disasters: Breaking Climate Records, has just been published by Penguin Books. Anthony was kind enough to share his insights with us before the first episode in the podcast.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow at the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which describes itself as a global think tank dedicated to promoting action on climate change.
He is also co-director of Climate Central, an independent climate analysis organization with an office in the UK, based at the University of East Anglia.
If you’d like to hear more about Masters of Disasters, check out Anthony’s book on YouTube, where he plays up and discuses the book’s “myth” of rising temperatures.
What we’re discussing
Anthony discussed how the Trump administration’s policies on climate change have created a new kind of disaster.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow at the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which describes itself as a global think tank dedicated to promoting action on climate change.
As Anthony explained:
Trump’s announcement of a withdrawal from the Paris Agreement has been described as the “moment of truth” in the history of climate policy.
But he’s also described it as the moment of “fatal flaw”.
The point of view that Trump’s decision makes possible is, paradoxically, the view of the climate change deniers, who are the ones who have been most skeptical of the idea of global warming in the first place.
The deniers argue that warming is not happening, and therefore it does not really matter whether people go on the record about their positions on climate change.
The opposite argument is the one that Anthony and his fellow deniers make. They say that the actions that are taken by governments and individuals will help to mitigate global warming, and this will lead the world (eventually) towards a warming