President Trump has said numerous times that climate change is a “hoax” and a “con job,” telling the United Nations last month that it was made up by “stupid people” despite a majority of credible scientists agreeing that it is real and causing massive issues in our world today.  

Many climate change deniers claim that scientists only study climate change for grant dollars, yet many of us never intended to study it in the first place. When scientists like myself work in the real world, out in the elements, we cannot avoid climate change’s broad and deep reach.

I never wanted to study climate change. For 15 years I studied the effects of different kinds of pollution, from pesticides to personal care products to industrial fertilizers. I documented quantitative evidence that man-made pollutants could do bad things to sea life, and by proxy ourselves. My early work was also in a lab, far away from the realities and complexities of our natural environment. Nowhere in these studies was there a consideration for climate change.  

It wasn’t until I started working on coral reefs in 2005 that I began to see, at an objectively scientific level, that climate change was always the primary driving force behind patterns in our data, even if we didn’t mean to study it. Without intention, then, my research, and the research of hundreds of other scientists, has found that the real issue is globally increasing temperatures driven by a less tangible pollutant. In truth, “climate change” is just a poorly marketed term for pollution of another variety — the carbon kind.  

For two decades now, my devoted team and I have conducted short-term (hours to days) and long-term (months to years) experiments on the effects of pollution on the reefs of Hawaii, Florida, Australia and the South Pacific. Some of these experiments have run more than seven years.

We found that in many cases, pollution like fertilizer runoff can cause disease and death of corals, the animals that build the foundation of tropical reefs. And yet every result we have collected, in every one of these well intentioned and carefully designed experiments, was waylaid by the increasingly frequent and severe heat waves that have arisen in the last decades. Either the effects of our pollution treatments were overwhelmed by high water temperatures driven by climate change or worse, climate change killed our whole experiment.  

There have been 11 recorded major coral bleaching events associated with marine heatwaves, or periods of time where sea surface temperatures are dramatically elevated compared to their typical seasonal means. Bleaching, when corals lose their primary symbionts and their critically provided food, can be followed by mass mortality events, or these heatwaves can cause direct immediate death where corals are literally cooked onsite due to dramatically high water temperatures outside coral’s normal tolerance.  

I used to work on Florida Keys reefs, but our research there has been stalled indefinitely because there simply aren’t enough animals to work with since three back-to-back heatwaves that caused mass die off events, killing thousands of the already depleted wild corals and about 80 percent of the corals being raised for restoration.  

Out of necessity, most of my research moved from Florida to the French South Pacific. But even there — almost 4,000 miles from the nearest continental coast — we can’t escape the heat. We have recorded four heat waves in the last 10 years that together have transformed these normally bountiful reefs from habitats where there was once 60 percent of the seafloor covered with healthy corals to barren plains with less than 1 percent live coral.  

These numbers aren’t fictional “con jobs” — they are scientific facts you can see with your own eyes. These reefs are graveyards devoid of most life except algae. The situation is so dire that the French and local government has placed a ban on coral collections in these areas, even for restoration or scientific purposes.  

It’s hard to do experiments on pollution when each reef you investigate is completely dead.  

Sewage and other forms of pollution such as plastic waste are optically clear issues, visually and sometimes viscerally tangible. Images of clogged and slimy green waterways are easy for the public to connect with because they personally experience it themselves. But carbon pollution from carbon dioxide and methane emissions are invisible, abstract and notoriously controversial.

I am not drinking some liberal pro-environment ivory tower Kool-aid about climate change. Rather, my own experiments, which were never focused on climate change, told me repeatedly that the Earth’s biggest pollution problem is increased temperatures.  

There is a concerted effort by the Trump administration to curtail, censor and even eliminate funding for climate change and environmental science research. Scientists need to remain steadfast and continue to conduct objective experiments, collect long-term data on climate effects and how they interact with other local factors, and write manuscripts that describe their results no matter if they disagree with this aministration’s false doctrine.  

Scientists don’t necessarily want to be political. But when the facts we collect and repeatedly confirm are disregarded as a “con,” we have to set the facts straight.     

Rebecca Vega Thurber is director of the UC Santa Barbara Marine Science Institute and public voices fellow with the OpEd Project at UCSB.