A newly minted meteorologist shares his experience challenging the dominant climate narrative—and the fierce backlash that ensued. —CCD Editor
Over the weekend, Sam Zeff, a reporter for KCUR, Kansas City’s NPR affiliate, told me over X that “you wasted your money on your degree.” [emphasis, links added]
I am a recent college graduate with a degree in meteorology. Zeff was replying to my post on social media, pointing out that he, and other climate activists, were ignoring basic scientific facts when they blamed man-made climate change for the tragic flooding in Texas.
The truth is that the rainfall and flooding along the Guadalupe River were not historically unprecedented and had little, if anything, to do with climate change. Neither heavy rainfall nor river flooding has increased in the Texas Hill Country over the last six decades.
So, let’s discuss the flooding in Texas.
Here are the facts many Democratic mouthpieces and some legacy media outlets are choosing to ignore:
1⃣ The National Weather Service (NWS) office in Austin / San Antonio was staffed with five meteorologists throughout the storms on… pic.twitter.com/7g2PvWRQcR
— Chris Martz (@ChrisMartzWX) July 6, 2025
The devastating loss of life in Texas is a reminder of the importance of meteorology and accurate science when it comes to understanding the weather. This is no time for politics or finger-pointing from either the left or the right.
As a trained meteorologist with a passion for truth, I can authoritatively tell folks on the right that the floods were not caused by cloud seeding or “chemtrails.”
Yet, when I also try to explain the data to social media users on the left, showing them that there is no evidence climate change caused or exacerbated the Texas floods, the conversations quickly devolve into insults or even threats.
Indeed, taunts from people like the NPR reporter who mocked my education have become sadly familiar.
I found myself exposed to insults, organized efforts to have me kicked out of school, and even occasional death threats.
After one of my posts on X about climate change went viral last year, I unintentionally became an online influencer.
This was never my career plan; I’d always been the kind of guy who kept his conversations among friends and avoided the spotlight.
But when I started posting on social media about hard science—and what it tells us about climate change theory and energy policy—I found myself exposed to insults, organized efforts to have me kicked out of school, and even occasional death threats.
I first became interested in meteorology in high school and signed up for an X account so I could network with professionals in the field. When I first started posting, I was an acolyte of the movement that believed climate change was entirely man-made.
Yet as I researched more, my views began to evolve and become more nuanced. And over the years, as my X posts increasingly challenged the orthodoxy surrounding climate change, the replies I got became nastier and the attacks increasingly personal.
Throughout college, university officials were tagged in X comments from (mostly) anonymous accounts, pressuring them to kick me out of school.
What’s more, my professors received emails almost weekly from attackers saying that I was a disgrace to the meteorology program and should be punished for spreading supposed “misinformation.”
Other critics would grab personal photos from my family’s social media accounts to decorate their posts denouncing me.
The viral tweet that shot me into the stratosphere was one I posted in June last year. It attracted more than 2.5 million views and over 30,000 likes:
Here’s my story.
I have been studying climate change for over six-years, and became so interested in it that I decided to pursue a meteorology degree which I complete next year.
When I first embarked on this journey, I started out as a casual believer in the mainstream…
— Chris Martz (@ChrisMartzWX) June 9, 2024
The post detailed my experiences trying to find the truth about climate change and encountering the reality that free speech can come under a sustained and ugly attack if it challenges certain cherished left-wing causes.
When it comes to climate, unpopular statements—even if they are based on undisputed scientific facts—are labeled by the loudest voices in the room as “false,” “misleading,” or “misinformation.”
America has a grave problem when a culture celebrates free speech “for me—but not for thee,” as the late Nat Hentoff famously put it.
True believers in free speech like Hentoff can be hard to find these days. Today, free thinkers who won’t go along with the establishment on certain, third-rail topics—more often than not concerning race, gender, or climate—run into a ferocious opposition that seeks not just to silence their voices, but to crush them.
I was taught that the scientific method is used to test hypotheses and theories against data to seek out truth.
I’ve come to understand that the vitriol directed at me is precisely because, perhaps, no one else my age with my reach is actively challenging the belief system on climate with facts and demanding answers.
I was taught that the scientific method is used to test hypotheses and theories against data to seek out truth.
But many youth have been captured by the belief that mankind is bringing about the end of the world through man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and that every weather event is the result of it, regardless of what the data and historical records actually show.
This narrative of man-made climate change causing cataclysmic destruction is taught as fact in schools. Leading news organizations invest in “climate teams” that keep filling the news hole with one-sided reports.
That’s why I’m one of the favorite targets of climate zealots. I’m young, I have a fresh new voice, and I am, as the New York Post called me, “the anti-Greta-Thunberg.”
It’s an interesting perch from which to witness—and participate in—the climate debate. On one hand, climate alarmists feel threatened by the fact that I used to be on their side, but now, based on study and research, I reject their position.
They don’t like that I’m good at chart making and data analysis, and can use humor to encourage people to take another look at the data and catastrophe-predicting models that, when run backwards across historical weather data, consistently get it wrong.
On the other hand, climate experts and respected professionals in the field privately message me routinely and tell me to keep up the good fight. These include high-profile meteorologists with decades of experience at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and at leading universities who have confessed confidentially that they cannot bring themselves to threaten their careers by speaking out.
In my final semester of college, I started thinking that all the blowback just wasn’t worth continuing this fight. But, as one veteran TV meteorologist told me, someone has to do it.
Someone has to speak up for what’s right—the belief that in America, we have to protect the ability to say what we believe and publicly debate theories, or we will lose that right.
The tragedy on the Guadalupe River shows that meteorology is serious business. Let’s not let politics, junk science, or unchallenged orthodoxies get in our way.
Chris Martz is a recent graduate of Millersville University with a BSc in meteorology and is a policy analyst for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.
Originally posted at the Free Beacon
Chris, without having met you or knowing you, you can be proud of yourself for standing up for science in a world that seems to be following political agendas of globalists which daily are regurgitated by mainstream media and some governments.
Meteorological data are bolstered substantially for the layman by matching the data with corresponding newspaper cuttings of related weather events and subsequent community damages.
Don’t be afraid to stand in the way of the Global Warming/Climate Change con-artists who are only interested in the Money if you were to totally cut off their cash they would not say a thing about Global Warming/Climate Change
Martz spends too much time talking about himself and talking about the climate. He has studied the weather and should stick to the subject of weather, not climate.
In April 2024, Martz claimed that Arctic sea ice extent was higher than in 1989 and the highest in 11 years, according to AFP Fact Check. However, this claim is considered misleading by experts because it cherry-picks data and does not accurately represent lnnong-term trends. Sea ice extent naturally fluctuates from year to year and season to season.
In this article Martz talks about meteorologist Joe Bastardi. Joe Bastardi knows weather. But his articles on climate are the worst I’ve ever read by any conservative writer in 28 years. He claims that all climate change is caused by underseas volcanoes and El Ninos. Due to that nonsense, I call him Joe Baloney.
If Martz must talk about the climate, he should talk about the climate in the past 50 years. There have been predictions and we have real data. The predictions made in the 1970s were pretty good. Add a lot of CO2 to the atmosphere and it will get warmer. That’s what happened. But the predictions also said that warmer would be dangerous. But most of the warming was in the colder nations during the colder months.
That’s something to celebrate.
Anybody can guess the claim in 50 or 100 years. I made my own guess in 1997 and it has been right so far. “Earth’s climate will get warmer unless it gets colder.” … Few people prefer colder.
The predictions in the 1970’s — pretty good?
Whatever happened to that “ice age”?
1979 doesn’t qualify as “the 1970’s”. Let’s have a little accuracy here, OK?
Very few scientists predicted a coming Ice Age in the early 1970s.
They got a huge amount of media publicity. A review of the scientific literature from 1965 to 1979 found that only a small number of papers (7 out of 71) predicted global cooling, while a larger number (44) predicted warming, and 20 were neutral.
In the later 1970s, there were climate models that made predictions.
When the actual CO2 increase in the past 50 years is applied to those climate models, the 1975-1979 forecast was +0.2 C. of global warming per decade. Actual global warming per decade per surface measurements was +0.2° C per decade. That is why I say the 1970s climate models made fairly good predictions based on an average of all models.
The models overstate the effect of CO2.
Surface measurements overstate actual warming.
I consider the average model to be a lucky guess. When they are used with the RCP 8.5 CO2 growth rate, they are just being used to scare people. That’s what climate alarmists do.
In 1997 I decided to call models “climate confuser games”.
Guessing the climate in 100 years is not science.
It is climate astrology.
The models are a waste of money.
The climate in 100 years will be warmer unless it’s colder.
All the models say warmer, with a wide variety of guesses.
So what?
More CO2 + global warming = good news.
“The climate in 100 years will be warmer unless it’s colder.”
Using a phrase I learned back in the 50’s, “Ain’t that the ‘bleeding’ truth.”
Thank you for the reply.
What is your education background in either weather or climate? I don’t think an MBA qualifies you to talk about either of them and yet you attack people who actually have credentials in those fields.
Chris, you are not “the anti-Greta-Thunberg” because unlike Thunberg you actually have an education in the field you are talking about. And good for you that you actually started to question the hypothesis that man-made CO2 is controlling the climate.
Chris moved from casual acceptance to full rejection of the “climate crisis” narrative as he gained knowledge of the subject. His path is not unique. Does anyone know of a climate skeptic getting into learning more about it and coming away a convinced activist?