Source: Shutterstock

Chris Martz
Date: 2 August 2026

My position on climate change in a nutshell:

Has the planet been gradually getting warmer for the last 175 years?

Yes, but it has been warming since at least 1750. Only since ~1950 or so has there been any potentially significant anthropogenic influence. How can anyone on the alarmist side explain the previous 200 years? What caused the initial warming? What caused the warming between 1910 and 1945, which is ~40% of post-1850 warming, but only ~10% of emissions? So, if natural variability hasn’t contributed to any warming since 1850 (which is assumed in the climate models), then you are ignoring that.

Is recent global warming man-made?

I think at least some of it has been. I don’t know how much exactly because it cannot be measured. Perhaps 25% or 50%. Maybe 75%? Carbon dioxide (CO2) is in fact a “greenhouse gas” (GHG). All else being equal, adding more of it to the atmosphere should cause at least some warming; that is, ~1°C per doubling of its concentration, plus any positive feedbacks that act to amplify it. In theory, this explanation makes sense. It’s radiative transfer physics. Some of it is basic math, some of it is more complicated, but it is well-understood.

But a challenge in actually attributing GHG emissions to all recent warming is that the natural energy flows in and out of the Earth’s climate system cannot be measured with the accuracy and precision needed to ascribe all recent warming to GHGs. The uncertainty on the TOA flux is about 5-10 W/m², which is much larger than the estimated Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI) allegedly from CO2 on the order of 0.8–1.2 W/m². What’s more, the climate models are artificially tuned such that there can be no natural causes of warming, CO2 is added, then it’s declared that CO2 is the only cause of global warming since 1850.

What about urbanization and land use change?

I think that urban sprawl and land use have been significant contributors to local + regional warming trends. Theoretically, this could explain part or even most of the warming globally outside the north polar region, which is mostly rural. We are investigating this in more detail because we are convinced that urban influences have not entirely been removed from the temperature record.

Is recent warming unusually rapid or unprecedented?

I don’t think so. Alarmists always bring up the “rate of change” argument in threads, but the idea that the recent warming spike is unprecedented in the last few thousand years is based on Michael Mann’s infamous tree ring-based “Hockey Stick” graph and the alleged independent look-a-like “verifications” that followed. But the attempts to verify it with different proxies all used the same (or a similar) methods that will generate hockey stick-shaped graphs from red noise. The shape of the graphs are largely a statistical artifact, not an accurate representation of global climate variability over the last 2,000 years. I tested this myself using random data. Ex-post correlation screening always produces a hockey stick shape.

Is extreme weather becoming worse?

Not really. There have been no increases in floods, droughts, thunderstorms + tornadoes + hailstorms, tropical cyclones, winter storms, or wildfires that can be attributed to GHG emissions at a global scale. There are definitely regional increases and decreases in some of these event types that are within the bounds of natural variability. In the case of certain drought types (e.g., hydrological and ecological) and wildfires that have increased regionally, that is usually attributable to land use change + poor water resource management and poor forest management, respectively. Evidence that GHG forcing has led to an increase in said events is, in my assessment, weak. You can maybe argue an increase in heatwaves and heavy rainfall since 1950 globally, but the increase in heavy rainfall occurred suddenly around 1990, which is largely an artifact of the change to automation and more efficient rain gauges.

There is also a lot of data (usually legitimate extreme Tmax and precipitation values) that get falsely marked as “missing” in the digitized data, which means they get missed in every analysis published in journals and on databases. We are finding that when you look at the original paper forms, most “missing” data aren’t actually missing and so we have to go in and correct the records. This is a major problem in the U.S. (in fact, filling all of the missing 20th century rainfall data in Texas in turns an increase in the top 1% of heavy rainfall events per station to a slight negative trend since 1900). I assume this problem exists outside the U.S., but at this point in time, I can’t be too sure. I haven’t looked into it yet.

Are there “fingerprints” of man-made warming?

No, not really. All global warming, natural or man-made, will result in higher latitudes warming faster than the mid-latitudes and land heating up faster than water (and by extension, the Northern Hemisphere warming faster than the Southern). So, while these changes would be consistent with GHG forcing, it’s also consistent with changes in solar activity, cloud cover changes, etc. The cooling in the stratosphere since the late 1970s is probably due to CO2. So, at least some of the warming in the troposphere since then is due to CO2. But not all of it can be attributed to CO2 necessarily because the physics of heat transfer in the troposphere are far more complex than that of the upper atmosphere where radiation is king and the physics are simpler. In the troposphere, you have convection and precipitation processes (latent heating) that are highly uncertain and these processes can change naturally. The fluxes on these are larger than the relatively small EEI estimated by CERES instrumentation and assumed to be due to CO2.

Is global warming dangerous?

As far as I can tell, no. The quality of life on Earth has never been better than it is today, and it is only projected to improve through 2100 by almost every measurable metric. We can adapt to whatever climate changes there are just like we always have. But just like with any climate change that has ever occurred, natural or man-made, there will be pros and cons to it depending on where you live. I am what you call a “lukewarmer.” I do not deny that there is anthropogenic influence on the climate system, but I’m also not running around like a hysterical chicken either. There are far more important environmental problems that need to be addressed that are within our control.

This article was published first on Chris Martz’ X-account on 30 July 2026.

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