CHARLES TOWN, West Virginia — Chris Martz was just a toddler when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, marking the beginning of what he describes as the “political indoctrination of extreme weather events.”
Now the 22-year-old freshly minted college grad has decided to make it his life’s mission to lower the temperature on climate hysteria.
“I’m the opposite of Greta Thunberg. In fact, she’s only 19 days older than me,” Martz comments to The Post, just shy of graduating with a degree in meteorology from Millersville University in Pennsylvania.
Unlike the Swedish climate icon and more radical activists, Martz approaches the complex topic of Earth’s dynamic climate with logic and analysis, instead of the emotional reactions and disruptive behaviors seen in alarmist circles, or the increasingly abstract theories proposed by left-leaning academics.
“I’ve always been a science-based, fact-based person,” Martz says over lunch near his small-town Virginia home. “My dad always said, ‘If you’re going to put something online, especially getting into a scientific or political topic, make sure what you’re saying is accurate. That way you establish a good credibility and rapport with your followers.’”
He started tweeting about the weather in high school and has amassed more than 100,000 followers, including, increasingly, powerful people in government. Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and Reps. Chip Roy and Thomas Massie have shared Martz’s posts examining weather patterns with fair-mindedness.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis paraphrased a Martz tweet last year when he shot back at a hostile reporter who tried to link Hurricane Milton to global warming.
DeSantis noted that since 1851 there had been 27 storms stronger than Milton (17 before 1950) when they made landfall in Florida, with the most deadly occurring in the 1930s.
“It was word-for-word my post,” Martz says. “His team follows me.”
Trump first-term Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler invited Martz to lunch two weeks ago in Washington, DC, where the two discussed Martz’s future and his experience as a college contrarian.
Hollywood celebrities have also taken a liking to the weather wunderkind. Martz brought his parents this year to dinner with Superman actor Dean Cain in Las Vegas. And in May, comic Larry the Cable Guy invited Martz backstage to meet after a show in Shippensburg, Penn.
“They didn’t have to be as nice as they were. They just treated me like I was their next-of-kin,” Martz says of his new celebrity friends.
The son of an auto-mechanic father and a mother who works in water science for the federal government, Martz grew up near Berryville, Va. (pop. 4,574), where he still lives.
His interest in meteorology started in childhood but not for the usual reasons — say, a fascination with tornados or love of winter storms.
But from a young age, Martz suspected his teachers and the media were lying to him, and that unleashed a storm of righteous indignation and a quest for truth.
It started Christmas Eve 2015 when 12-year-old Martz was sweating in church. An outside thermometer read 75 degrees. It was a rare December heat wave, and the media were catastrophizing about global warming. Martz became stricken with paranoia over our boiling planet’s future.
“Everyone seems to remember white Christmases when they were a kid, but the data doesn’t back that up. It may be that we’re remembering all the movies where it snows at Christmas,” he says.
“And I had science teachers telling me New York City was going to be under water in 20 years and that fossil fuels are destroying the environment.”
But just a couple weeks after that December heat wave, a blizzard slammed the eastern United States, dumping record snowfall on his Virginia town. He wondered: What was really going on?
Then Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston in 2017, and the media again blamed man-made climate change. Martz dug into the data and was shocked to learn there’d been a hurricane drought in America in the preceding 12 years, from 2005 to 2017, the longest period on record — dating back to George Washington’s time — that a Category 3, 4 or 5 storm had failed to make landfall.
In fact, many of the most powerful storms to hit the United States, he learned, occurred before the 1930s.
Today, Martz calls himself a “lukewarm skeptic.”
While he does believe the Earth may be warming and human activity may contribute, natural variation remains the more likely culprit for changes in climate, and doomsday predictions are fueling unnecessary hysteria with a political motive.
Martz instead looks at physical measurements to assess what’s happening with Earth’s climate. Catastrophic climate models that are so fashionable in academia can be manipulated to say whatever you want, he says. “Models are not evidence.”
“You can make the case we’ve seen heavier rainfall in the eastern United States, but it all depends on where you start the graph,” Martz says. “Since 1979, there’s been an eastward shift in Tornado Alley. Okay, that’s evidence of climate change. That’s not evidence that humans caused it.
“A lot of the biggest tornado outbreaks during the 1920s and ’30s occurred in the southeastern United States, where we see them today. Whereas in the 1950s and ’60s they occurred more in the Great Plains,” he explains.
“So it’s likely that it oscillates due to changes in ocean circulation patterns and how that affects the placement of pressure systems and where moisture convergence is and wind shear is and how those dynamics play out. It’s much more likely an artifact of natural variability.
“There’s no physical mechanism that makes sense to say, well, if you add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere that it’s going to cause an eastward shift of tornadoes in the United States.”
As hurricanes have failed to become more frequent or powerful, the media has glommed on to wildfires as the climate emergency du jour.
Even the Trump administration’s climate.gov states in the aftermath of this year’s Los Angeles Palisades fire: “Scientists widely agree that human-caused warming is generally making fires in California and the rest of the West larger and more severe.”
Martz counters this. “California has been getting drier in the last 100 years or so,” he says. “However, in the geological past, it’s been much drier in California. Between 900 and 1300 AD, there was a 400-year-long drought that was worse than today’s in the southwestern United States.”
Blaming Big Oil is much easier than blaming themselves, Martz says of California’s politicians, insisting many of the state’s fires could be avoided if powerlines were placed underground, instead of on dry hillsides where downsloping winds snap transmission lines (a likely cause of January’s fires, he says), and if the state had better forest management.
“It’s all a giant money-making scheme,” Martz tells The Post. “Politicians and bureaucrats latch on to scientific issues, whether it was the pandemic, for example, or climate, to try and get certain policies implemented. In usual cases, it’s a left-wing, authoritarian kind of control.
“We want to control what kind of energy you use, control the kind of appliances you can buy, how much you can travel, what you can drive, what you can eat, all that. But in order to do that, they need scientists telling a certain message. And the science is funded by government actors.”
Martz himself gets accused of having nefarious backers, namely Big Oil, which he finds laughable as just a college kid with a Twitter account. He works part-time as a research assistant for the DC-based nonprofit Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which advocates for free-market energy solutions, and insists it hasn’t taken money from the fossil-fuel industry for nearly two decades.
That hasn’t stopped angry climate cultists from trying to ruin his life.
“For my last three years of college, there were endless phone calls, emails sent to the provost, the president, trying to get me kicked out. They’d have department meetings about me. Thankfully, my professors had my back,” he says.
For all his detractors, Martz remains in good company. The meteorologist founders of both The Weather Channel and AccuWeather have been known to push back against the left’s climate-change voodoo, along with prominent climatologists like Judith Curry, Roy Spencer and John Christy.
But Martz thinks his youth makes him particularly threatening to the established order.
“They don’t seem to realize yet that cancel culture doesn’t work anymore,” he says. “They’re getting angry because they’re losing their grip on the narrative. They’re getting desperate to try to stop anyone who is making a difference.”
