President Trump has said many times that climate change is a… “Cheat” and a “fraudulent act,” Despite telling the United Nations last month that it was created by “stupid people” Most credible scientists agree that it is real And is causing massive problems in our world today.
Many deny climate change Claim Scientists study climate change only for the grant dollars, yet many of us never intended to study it in the first place. When scientists like me work in the real world, out in the elements, we can’t escape the broad and deep reach of climate change.
I never wanted to study climate change. For 15 years I studied various types of effects pollution, From pesticides to personal care products to industrial fertilizers. I have documented quantitative evidence that man-made pollutants can have adverse effects on marine life in and of itself. My early work was also in a laboratory, far removed from the realities and complexities of our natural environment. Climate change was not considered anywhere in these studies.
It wasn’t until I started working on coral reefs in 2005 that I began to see on an objective scientific level that climate change was always the primary driving force behind the patterns in our data, even if we didn’t intend to study it. Without any pun intended, my research and the research of hundreds of other scientists has shown that the real issue is global warming driven by less solid pollutants. The truth is, “climate change” is a poor marketing term for another type of pollution – the carbon kind.
For two decades now, my dedicated team and I have conducted short-term (hours to days) and long-term (months to years) experiments on the effects of pollution on reefs in Hawaii, Florida, Australia, and the South Pacific. Some of these experiments have lasted more than seven years.
We found that in many cases, fertilizer runoff can cause pollution such as Coral disease and deathAnimals that form the foundation of tropical reefs. And yet whatever results we have obtained, every single one of these well-intentioned and carefully designed experiments, was hampered by increasingly frequent and severe heat waves over the past decades. were either overwhelmed by the effects of our pollution treatments high water temperature Induced by climate change Or worse, climate change destroys our entire experiment.
11 have been recordedmajor coral bleachingEvents associated with marine heat waves, or periods of time where sea surface temperatures rise dramatically compared to their normal seasonal means. Bleaching, when corals lose their primary symbionts and the food they critically provide, can lead to mass mortality events, or these heatwaves can directly cause immediate death, where corals literally ripen on site due to dramatically high water temperatures outside the coral’s normal tolerance.
I used to work on the Florida Keys reefs, but our research there is on hold indefinitely because there aren’t enough animals to work with because of three consecutive heatwaves.mass death incidentsKilled thousands of wild corals and destroyed about 80 percent of the coral reefs that were already depleted Raised for restoration,
Out of necessity, most of my research moved from Florida to the French South Pacific. But even there – nearly 4,000 miles from the nearest continental coast – we can’t escape the heat. We have recorded four heat waves over the past 10 years that have simultaneously transformed these normally abundant reefs from habitats where 60 percent of the sea floor was once covered with healthy corals, to barren plains with less than 1 percent living coral.
These numbers are not imaginary “fraudulent jobs” – they are scientific facts you can see with your own eyes. These rocks are cemeteries devoid of most life except algae. The situation is so serious that the French and local government have banned coral collection in these areas, even for restoration or scientific purposes.
It’s hard to conduct experiments on pollution when every rock you examine is completely dead.
Sewage and other forms of pollution such as plastic waste are optically obvious issues, which are visible and sometimes directly tangible. Images of clogged and muddy green waterways are easier for the public to connect with because they experience it in person. But carbon pollution from carbon dioxide and methane emissions is invisible, intangible, and notoriously controversial.
I’m not some liberal environmentalist drinking the ivory tower Kool-Aid about climate change. In fact, my own experiments, which were never focused on climate change, have repeatedly told me that Earth’s biggest pollution problem is rising temperatures.
There is a concerted effort by the Trump administration to reduce, censor, and even eliminate funding Climate Change and Environmental Science ResearchScientists need to remain steadfast and continue conducting objective experiments, collecting long-term data on climate impacts and how they interact with other local factors, and writing manuscripts that describe their results, even if they disagree with this administration’s false theory.
Scientists don’t necessarily want to be political. But when the facts we collect and repeatedly confirm are disregarded as “fraud”, we have to clarify the facts.
Rebecca Vega Thurber is the director of the UC Santa Barbara Marine Science Institute and a Public Voices fellow with the OPED Project at UCSB.
