By Jo Nova
The poor today are even paying to help the very rich people of 2100 get slightly richer
Matt Ridley
In a droll, but scathing assessment, Matt Ridley calculates that even in a best case scenario, with the most generous estimate of how useful a wind turbine might be, the people in the UK are spending £25 billion a year to reduce global emissions of CO2 by 0.00002 or two hundredths of one percent.
At that rate getting the world to net zero will cost £100 trillion a year – or the entire world’s economic output.
The numbers burn like the Hindenburg, yet serious people keep a straight face, like we are living in an episode of Monty Python. The Parliamentarians pretend to save the world, the scientists research a pretend world, and the media pretend to be journalists.
Excerpts from Matt Ridley on X:
The climate boondoggle is one of the most regressive wealth transfers in history: never in the field of human commerce, or at least not since the sheriff of Nottingham, has so much tax been paid by people so poor to people so rich. Perhaps Ed Miliband is hoping that by giving lots of money to rich people, he can then impose a wealth tax on them in a sort of economic perpetual-motion machine.
There appears to be no end to his generosity to the rich. He has recently announced an increase in subsidies for electric cars, electric heating and electricity bills, and this week he quietly let slip that he will raise the amount he pays for new wind farms and index-link the payment for an extra five years.
What’s that? You don’t have a wind farm? Bad luck. Landowners who do can trouser £150,000 per wind turbine per year in rent for twenty to thirty years. One is arguing in court that £10m a year for his wind farm is not enough. …
Ridley quotes the latest official State of the Climate Report and asks:”Wheres the horror, Ed?”
The state of the climate report, which he presented to Parliament last week, says only that “recent decades have been warmer, wetter and sunnier than the 20th Century” with earlier springs and more “lawn-cutting days”. Mostly good news unless you hate lawn-mowing. There has been more warming in winter than summer, so less frost, less snow and fewer “heating days”: good news given that death rates spike in cold weather much more than in hot weather.
It says we now have 10% more rain, most of it in winter but the report can only “suggest a slight increase” in heavy rainfall while finding a “downward trend” in both average wind speed and maximum gust speed. On balance, good news. The only bad news is that sea level is rising, still very slowly – about a foot per century – but perhaps with a slight acceleration.
The inescapable pointlessness of the wind power boondoggle is there for all to see:
…let’s do the sums: Britain produces 0.8% of the world’s emissions. Electricity supplies roughly 20% of our energy and wind supplied about 25% of our electricity last year.
Let’s be generous and assume that windmills cut emissions by maybe 60% over their lifetimes compared with gas turbines…
It follows that Britain’s wind farms are achieving a reduction of 0.008 x 0.20 x 0.25 x 0.6 = 0.0002, or two hundredths of one percent of global emissions. That is what £25 billion a year, paid by you in direct and indirect subsidies according to the Renewable Energy Foundation, is buying you. At that rate getting the world to net zero will cost £100 trillion a year – or the entire world’s economic output.
He cites Richard Tol’s study showing that even if the world warms by (an unbelieveable) 3 degrees, global GDP will only be about 2% smaller than it would have otherwise been. And total GDP is expected to grow massively, either way.
Alternatively, if we go by the IPCC‘s business-as-usual model, and if “…we forget about climate change and just let the fossil-fuel economy rip” the average person will be an “astonishing 9.8 times richer in 2100 even with the effects of rapid climate change, instead of 10.4 times without it”.
Matt Ridley:
So Mr Miliband is asking you to reduce your standard of living today to save a bunch of very, very wealthy future people from being slightly less – but still very, very – wealthy. Your prosperity is sacrificed to their posterity. This is therefore yet another way in which he is transferring money from the poor to the rich. Was he sheriff of Nottingham in a previous life?
Read it in full on X, there is a lot more — or in a somewhat edited version in the Daily Mail, which Matt warns contains errors, introduced by editors while he was away.
Image by emely krause from Pixabay
I saw a TV clip yesterday where Ed Miliband was asked ,again, in parliament what temperature reduction can be expected, as a result of his extreme & very expensive emissions reduction action.
Ed Miliband’s reply was a garbled message about something only he knows about but did not mention any temperature numbers decreasing, or increasing for that matter.
I’m convinced Ed M & our prized Bonehead Bowen swap ideas on how to dodge questions about subjects that neither of them know anything about. To think that these two have fathered children does not bode well for the future of either country!! 😵💫😵💫😵💫😵💫
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Very, very few politicians ever answer the questions put to them.
It’s contempt of parliamentary procedure and the public.
It’s another reason why I can’t stand them.
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I wonder who downticked you?
Supine journalists let these scum get away with not answering the questions and also fail to call them out for lying – which is what they do most of the time. They should take a leaf out of Donald’s book – or the gorgeous Karoline Leavitt – and tell it like it is. Take them back to the question asked and point out they waffled. If they waffle more then stop them and ask the question again.
I don’t know if the footage of Donald and the golf course made it Down Under where our idiot PM Two Tier Kier sat there like a ventriloquist’s dummy only of less use.
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Millibrand rivals blackout for arrogance and ignorant stupidity. What we need is for Gerry Noonan to define the energy narrative.
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Matt Ridley is a very experienced hand at this. So why did he turn his back and allow the lying MSM to gut his article before publication ? As if he didn’t realise this would happen !
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Far be it from me to give the press the benefit of the doubt, but Hanlon’s Razor is strong possibility in this instance.
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Never attribute to stupidity, that which is better explained by venality.
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It’s the Daily Mail, readers can’t handle multiple syllables. I hope Viscount Ridley also disclosed his conflict of interest as the landowner of the largest coal mine in the UK.
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Ohh, poor Simon once again show his inability to stick with the written article to make an argument, instead chose the low-class way to attack the person instead which doesn’t work in rational discourse arenas such as this place where it is expected for people to discuss the content of the article for debate…..
The post remains unchallenged because you didn’t challenge it at all with an insight that others here could benefit from but alas….
Poor of you Simon.
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Wind has replaced coal as a primary source of electricity in the UK. The millions of dollars in royalties that the Ridley family collect is under threat. Hint: when multi-millionaires start talking about taxes on poor people it is usually because the money is going to a different rich person than themselves.
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Yawnnnn…. Zzzzzz, still have nothing to say about the CONTENT of the post thus becomes clear you have nothing to say about it.
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Simon, What is the largest generation source of electricity in China? you know the place where the UK and almost every other western nation has transferred it’s industry / manufacturing to?
When I say transferred, it’s really just forfeited, along with their economic prosperity, sovereign security and engineering / technological knowhow.
We can’t survive as a “services sector” economy buy soy lattes from each other.
Cheap electricity builds strong economies and the cheapest power is made from energy dense fuels. Uranium, coal, oil, gas. Those are the facts champ.
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Without coal, gas and nuclear western civilisation is finished. Casting aspersions at coal is the sure mark of a saboteur.
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Errors introduced by Editors? Whatever it takes I suppose. Shameless.
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Dr Matt Ridley is a gem and is a very careful researcher and we can quote him without fear.
He was the first person to tell us the world was GREENING and has been hated by the left wing loonies for decades.
BTW Dr Richard Tol’s work is very close to Nobel prize winner Prof Nordhaus’s calculations and I’ve often linked to the Lomborg group’s highlighting of their work.
The trouble is that Labor, Greens and Teals have 2.5 more years to display their ignorance and stupidity and should easily win again in 2028. Just unbelievable but true.
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Well, that’s how it looks. But don”t give up hope just yet.
In this field Barnaby Joyce and Michael McCormick are a formidable team.
They have been given a roving commission to get on with the job regardless of what the money grubbers in the Liberals have to say.
It should not take them very long to bring the AGW scam thoroughly unstuck.
What will the Marxists do then? They will have to find a new plot.
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Well… that’s that – the last conspiracy theory has been proven correct: we’ve run out of them now, no more left, the cupboard is bare. Surely the Mess!ah will soon appear…
/s
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I was advised by the infamous greenie commenter Ros on the Herald Sun media that ‘we have changed the climate by our action’. I’m not sure where she gets her evidence of climate action actually changing the climate as she didn’t reply to my request.
I note also that the idiot Bowen is posting non-stop on Facebook attacking all and sundry re climate policy. He must be feeling some pressure being so public in his profile. No doubt the censor team are deleting a majority of the comments.
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That kind of thing is to be expected. We are dealing with a chaotic and highly variable dynamic. If there’s a reduction, or an easing in whatever it is they think they are measuring, they claim that climate action must be working. But there has been no reduction in atmospheric co2 or emmissions. Does she realize that she is actually shooting down the claimed, but rediculous, correlation of FF co2 being the main instrument of man made CC?
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Labor = lies and bulls#it on repeat. If we follow the climate liars we are all stuffed.
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David, you are so correct. The Liar in the Lodge ran around with a Medicare card in the last 2 elections but now we find out the hard way how he lies. Men can now only have a PSA test every two years or it costs $110 up from $50. Had to have a cortisone shot this week, now charge is $359.00 get back about $133,00 almost double since early 2024.I guess we are all paying for the mob they are letting into the country to totally destroy our national identity
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Stick this one on the fridge for future reference.
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God almighty, they are shafting us. The Medicare card on all TV shows was a con.
From 1 July, even podiatrists don’t / can’t bulk bill the 5 yearly sessions for us oldies. We have to pay outright the $65 (reduced for oldies!) then get back the Medicare $61.xx refund. It’s come to $3.xx out of pocket, not a big deal, but it IS telling.
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https://tapnewswire.com/2025/07/21/a-memory-hole-for-rothschild-in-rio-origins-of-climate-alarmism/
Looks like it was Edmund de Rothschild who decided that CO2 was going to be the bad boy of climate back in the 80’s; bankers doing science. The scam has grown ever since with the bankers taking more and more from the people, aided by the prostitutes of climatism that walk among us. Israel was another Rothschild project, and look how that is going, legitimizing mass murder of a group of their own citizens, the untermenschen, as a mechanism for stealing their land; the South Africans never achieved this level of depravity during the apartheid days.
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If the Net Zero Australia group is correct about Aussies’ net zero sums ( 7 to 9 trillion $) it would cost the world about 100 times that number or 700 to 900 TRILLION $.
Bloomberg’s group calculated about 250 TRILLION $ to change the world to net zero, so Matt Ridley is at the extreme lower end with 100 TRILLION $.
BTW Aussie’s emit just 1% of global co2 emissions, so the global net zero change would be 100 times that 7 to 9 TRILLION $ number according to the Australian Net Zero groups’ calculations.
Anway obviously just a load of BS and nonsense.
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BTW I was wrong because Matt Ridley actually stated it would cost the world 100 trillion $ every year, not a full cost of 100 trillion.
So if the entire world took 20 years to reach net zero the full cost would be 2,000 trillion $.
IOW just more of their BS and lunacy and this is a complete fairy story.
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Here he is on a podcast at Spiked with Brendan O’Neill. https://www.spiked-online.com/podcast-episode/climate-covid-and-the-corruption-of-science/
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Thanks Jethro and I’ll watch Brendon and Matt later on when I have the time. About 58 minutes but we’ll all learn a lot.
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The worst thing about this wanton boondoggle – apart from the massive waste of money, resources, effort and time – is that the left side of the dispatch box are keeping shtum. It’s impossible to believe there are no MPs in the assorted Labour/Labor parties who aren’t prepared to call out this racket.
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Quite right Tony and the ‘Oposition’ is failing the country by not shouting about this disgraceful scam from the rooftops. Never mind what focus groups and private polling have to say about climate catastrophism, concentrate on the truth. The trouble is that not enough politicians have taken the trouble to look beyond what the climate change industry is telling them.
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Frankly, PADRE, I doubt if many politicians would understand the issues, even if it was explained to them. They still believe in “the science” as espoused by the climate models, and have no idea what the models were based on and what factors were, and still are, missing from them. The concept of climate cycles, the effects of ocean currents and clouds, the elliptical paths of the sun, our planet and others in the solar system and the geological history of climate would all be too much for them. Much easier to believe in “the science”.
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So according to Ridley, $50 billion dollars year (25 million pounds) to cut emissions in the UK and reduce the emissions by CO2 by 0.00002% . What that translates for temp ? 0.0005°C, less than a thousandth of a degree or effectively zero. So Milaband pathetic response was The cost of inaction are much greater than the costs of action.
I would say not true, if one doesn’t spend $50 billion a year of taxpayers money on rubbish we are all better off.
Alas Bowen and his ilk do’t listen to commonsense.
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I think you meant 25 billion pounds.
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Lomborg warned us in Jan 2025 that “climate change fanatics want to bankrupt the entire world for little to no reward”.
Here’s his long article in the New York Post and he tells us how much better off people will be in 2100 or about 4.3 times richer than today.
That’s using Prof Nordhaus and Dr Tol’s calculations and after allowing for their so called dangerous CC.
It’s a fairly long article but well worth a read.
https://nypost.com/2025/01/19/opinion/climate-change-fanatics-want-to-bankrupt-the-entire-world-for-little-to-no-reward/
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This is the even if it was true argument.
Then the CO2 coalition’s argument that CO2 cannot warm the planet anyway and a man made increase in CO2 is great news.
The fact there is no fossil fuel CO2 in the air is denied or ignored. Why?
CO2 is oblivious to human activity. It is the equilibrium pressure of a very soluble gas on a water world.
And Bill Gates wants to bring on another ice age. Is everyone mad. Or has WWIII already begun?
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What is settled science is that it is not true. And the only people who support the lie are people who profit by it.
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G’day TdeF,
Has WWIII started?
I reckon the answer is yes, and was declared some years back with just two sentences, buried in the IPCC charter:
1. IPCC research will focus solely on human caused climate change; and
2. IPCC research will be published after the Summary for Policy makers and support that summary.
(My words, for the ideas. My memory is that the original statements were a bit more verbose.)
Then the Blob’s censorship and propaganda legions went into action.
Cheers,
Dave B
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Jennifer Marohasy is developing some very interesting theories on CO2 production and, in particular, the ratio of “ancient CO2” from fossil fuels, claimed to be identified from the ratios of C13 and C12 in the atmosphere. She managed to find some data from work done in the Siberian forests in Russia. This work has shown that in winter these forests emit massive amounts of CO2 with almost identical isotopes to CO2 from coal. Her inference is that these ratios cannot be used to identify “ancient” CO2 as nature is producing it every day in respiration from trees. Another theory gone bust, perhaps.
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I find it amazing that none of it is proven. None.
But you are told The Science is settled. By whom?
And if you question that, you are a denier.
The Australian and British carbon cash theft is quite illegal. Unconstitutional. Hidden. Extortion. Evil. But taxing petrol is forbidden. The people would notice that. It is monstrous stuff engineered by public servants. Even the politicians seem oblivious. All acting like Joe Biden. Don’t know and don’t care.
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It’s also the biggest transfer of money from developed countries to developing countries, with China being the main beneficiary. And, that’s the main goal of the climate change agreements, which is to shift the balance of power from western democracies to China and other authoritarian nations and it’s been running for over 30 years and it’s working exactly as planned. If people spent a few minutes and read the UNFCCC agreement drafted way back in 1992, they would realise that this has never been about reducing CO2.
Article 4, Section 7, clearly states (my bold):
“The extent to which developing country Parties will effectively implement their commitments under the Convention will depend on the effective implementation by developed country Parties of their commitments under the Convention related to financial resources and transfer of technology and will take fully into account that economic and social development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of the developing country Parties.”
In any developing country, economic and social development and poverty eradication will always be overriding factors. That’s why we call them developing countries. CO2 emissions went up faster after the UNFCCC and subsequent climate treaties because of the effect of the treaties, which sped up growth in non-OECD countries by its very design and that’s still happening today, developing nations getting a free FF pass and developed countries now permanently hamstrung. The resulting faster increase in CO2 was always going to happen and those that designed the agreement already knew this would occur, which demonstrates the UN considers CO2 to be a harmless gas. The reality is that global CO2 emissions would be lower today if no climate change agreements had ever occurred in the first place.
This is the biggest scam in human history by a very long way and it’s being driven by China’s influence in the UN, combined with other BRICKS nations and also driven by greedy rent seeker oligarchs and Marxist loving politicians in western countries that can spot an opportunity to flip the system for their personal and ideological benefits. The return to surfdom has been in full swing now for 30 years and the west is now entering the final stage where the money soon runs out and there is total dependency on countries like China and Russia, where we end up in check mate and slaves to these new masters.
Perhaps the worst part in watching this unravel over 30 years is that the evil powers that devised this scheme used our own democratic system against us to brainwash enough people within our own societies to do the job, using a fake CC scare campaign to destroy our economies, mass immigration to create cultural discourse and a host of other divisive social strategies to divide society and create a resentment of our own great culture. Today, we have more than 50% of voters receiving their main income source from government, so we are now officially a socialist welfare state where votes are now owned by the Marxist political camp and power is locked in permanently. The recent shifting of our national allegiance away from the democratic USA and to the hostile communist state of China marks the beginning of the final chapter. Hopefully, Trump can save the USA, but it’s hard to see how Australia can reverse the slide from this point, with no political opposition and a new government that has total control.
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About 1951 I dropped a quarter in a collection basket at church (alright, it was mother’s quarter). The cash was headed to Africa to help the starving. This was well before “climate change” became a thing. I don’t remember what we were told was the reason the villagers needed my help. I now know that why they still do is beyond solving by the developed nations.
I should have kept the quarter and bought ice cream.
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A young girl out with her dad sees a homeless tramp and says to dad, could you give me $5 to give to that poor man, dad says I’ll tell you what, if you mow the yard and wash the car, I’ll pay you the $5 so you can give it to him, stuff that she says, why can’t he come here and mow the lawn and wash the car for the $5.
Ta da.
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Africa. Go to gutenberg.org and download free The Crime of the Congo, by Arthur Conan Doyle.
Yes, the author of Sherlock Holmes, but this book is non fiction.
Then you might have an idea of why that $5 didn’t lift Africa out of poverty.
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Back to 2015 …
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Afternoon all,
I’m rather surprised that the ABC has such a comprehensive story, but I guess they think there’ll be a big backlash from their large audience.
Well worth a read.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-26/wa-liberals-support-motion-to-abandon-net-zero-by-2050-policy/105576674
Cheers,
Dave B
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There are two “ abandoning “ actions necessary for the coalition to even come close to winning the next election:-
Firstly abandon the Liberal Party leader & about 40% of the party room members.
Secondly abandon net zero, subsidies, quotas & the woke culture sucking the life blood out of from the “ clever “ country.
Without the above the LNP will wither & die before regaining government.
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Without those actions, we will abandon them.
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Ley will fight it with her dying breath.
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Malcolm pushing hard
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It was pushed into international politics by Margaret Thatcher. ‘Nuff said.
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The same story since Robin H and William W.
The peasantry being played by both sides in order to squeeze the last drip of productivity from the tax base.
I’ve had the suspicion that BP and Exxon are grifting the climate narrative as much as anybody.
“Oh no!”
“Look!”
“Those terrible people are making us squeeze you dry for our product, which we would humanitarianly provide to you if it weren’t for them.”
Carbon.
SLR.
Russian collusion.
Trans.
Race ‘equity’.
Epstein.*
All same movie script except we can never figure out who the real bad guys are.
We get to fight each other over whether we will be ruled by that inbred gaggle of psychopathic cousins as opposed to … their cousins.
*(Abbreviated list due to editorial considerations.)
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Communism is a Gain of Wealth virus unleashed by The Blob against Humanity.
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Something to teach young people: when politicians glibly throw around the word “BILLION”, nobody really gets it.
A million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A Trillion seconds is 31,000 years.
Translate the seconds into dollars.
Now you get the scale of the fraud.
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Book: ‘The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science’
Book: ‘Human Caused Global Warming, the Biggest Deception in History’
https://www.technocracy.news/dr-tim-ball-on-climate-lies-wrapped-in-deception-smothered-with-delusion/
https://www.technocracy.news/tim-ball-the-evidence-proves-that-co2-is-not-a-greenhouse-gas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOEFQDcT_lM
Tim died Sept 24th 2022Everything Reminds Me of Tim is now in the Kindle store!
https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Reminds-Me-Tim-Biography-ebook/dp/B0D9TWV4V2
[Fixed bottom link – LVA]
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