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........

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