By Chadwick Moore | New York Post
CHARLES TOWN, West Virginia — Chris Martz was still in diapers when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005 — but that moment, he says, kicked off 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 anti-Greta Thunberg. In fact, she’s only 19 days older than me,” Martz tells The Post, barely a week out from receiving his undergraduate degree in meteorology from Pennsylvania’s Millersville University.
Unlike the Swedish climate poster child turned Gaza groupie, Martz tackles the incomprehensibly complex subject of Earth’s ever-changing climate with reason and data, rather than alarmists’ emotional outbursts and empty, disruptive antics — or the increasingly mystical theories of left-wing 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.