Listen to your mother — especially if your mother is a climate scientist.
That’s the hope of the nonprofit Science Moms, a group of scientists who are mothers who study climate change. The group hopes to connect with other moms to make climate change a normal topic of conversation — and therefore one that deserves action and attention.
Sierra Petersen, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences in LSA, studies what Earth’s climate was like millions of years in the past, and is a member of Science Moms.
What is Science Moms, and what is its goal?
Science Moms is a nonprofit organization that brings the message of climate change advocacy to the general public. Specifically, it’s a group of moms who are also climate scientists speaking to other moms about why they should care about climate change, and be in favor of taking action to address climate change.
With Science Moms, we’re focused on protecting the future for our children. We’re all moms, we’re thinking of our kids’ future and what they are going to be experiencing when they go to college and when they have their own kids. What is the world going to be like at those time points in their life? A lot of it is thinking about time scales of change.
In my research, I think about how quickly climate changed through Earth history. It’s just a slight slip of the mental framework to look forward instead and think about how quickly the climate is changing now in relation to my lifetime, my kids’ lifetime.
We want to spread the word and encourage people to think about climate change as an issue that might be of importance to them. The more people that are thinking about it and talking about it, the more likely there is to be movement on this issue. The whole goal of Science Moms is to have people thinking about it and talking about it and raising it up in their list of priorities of things that factor into decision making.
Can you talk a little bit about your research and how it informs your work with Science Moms?
I study paleoclimate — what the climate was like in the past, millions of years ago, thousands of years ago. I look at the chemistry of fossil seashells to tell about how ocean temperatures have changed over time.
One time period that I focus on is the Cretaceous thermal maximum, which was about 90 million years ago. It was the warmest time in the last 300 million years. We’re trying to quantify how hot it was during this time.
We looked at shells from Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, which was an ocean at that time, and found that the water temperatures of this shallow ocean that covered Wyoming 90 million years ago were as hot as the waters around Bali today.
Just over the length of human experience and human weather records, climate has not actually varied that much, but over Earth history, there have been times when the Earth was much hotter than today, much colder than today. There were ice ages and tropical greenhouse periods.
Understanding how all the pieces of the climate system fit together and how they work under those really different background climates makes us understand the whole climate system better. This means that we’re able to predict future climate changes, better understand what might happen, and how these different pieces are interlinked.
I spend a lot of my work day thinking about the past, but we can learn a lot about what might happen in the future from looking to the past.
How does outreach through Science Moms work?
Science Moms is focusing on trying to build trusted experts in your local community. We work with local news, newspapers and TV as experts and do some pre-recorded ads about a specific topic.
How I participate in Science Moms is by being an expert that the media can turn to when there’s something like Hurricane Helene coming and people are trying to grapple with whether a weather event is out of the norm or how climate change plays a role in this. We’re a local expert who’s also a mom who’s just like you. We can tie climate change back into those family values and try to make it really nonpolitical.
I’m not a politician. I’m a scientist. I’m just telling you what I know from my job as a scientist and also how I think about this from my role as a mom. We are trying to take advantage of being a person, you know, I live in your community. And I’m also an expert on this.
What’s the most effective way to talk about climate change?
Look for the dual and triple benefits. The example I love is with leaf blowers. You can switch from a gas-powered to an electric leaf blower, and that has benefits for climate, but it’s also quieter. It’s less smelly. Using an electric blower is just improving your quality of life, even if you don’t care about the climate element at all.
Same for electric vehicles. Electric school buses are one that I think of. Ann Arbor has made progress on that and more communities, hopefully, will adopt electric school buses. Everybody’s been driving behind the school bus and you smell that exhaust and it’s awful. Electric school buses don’t have that exhaust, right?
Our kids are breathing cleaner air riding to school every day. I think focusing on these dual benefits is a way to let people get on board with a change without needing to change their political identity.
It’s also the way that we’re most likely to actually make changes in our life. We’re not likely to make a change just because we believe it is the right thing to do. The more added benefits you get, the more likely you are to actually make the change.
