Nature Quest: What Does Climate Change Sound Like?

Feel like summers are hotter than they used to be? It’s not just your imagination. Climate researchers say that average annual temperatures around the country have been trending upwards for the past 50 years — and are still on the rise. But it can be hard to represent those numbers in a way that makes sense to everyday people. So Gulf States Newsroom reporter and New Orleans resident Drew Hawkins wondered: What if he could help people hear those changes for themselves? Turn temperatures into tunes? This episode is part of Nature Quest, a monthly Short Wave segment that answers listener questions about their local environment. Got a question about changes in your local environment? Send a voice memo to [email protected] mailto:[email protected] with your name, where you live and your question. We might make it into our next Nature Quest episode! Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from University of Buffalo, where scientists are working to protect the Great Lakes and freshwater supplies around the world from harmful contamination. Learn more about their research at buffalo.edu/npr.

• 0:15Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:23Emily Kwong?

  Hey, everyone. Emily Kwong here. And Hannah Chen. And this month's Nature Quest is a little different because we are joined by a special guest, public health reporter Drew Hawkins from the Gulf States Newsroom. Hey, Drew.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  Hey, Emily. Hey, Hannah. Great to be here.

• 0:38Emily Kwong?

  And Drew, you're calling in from New Orleans, which isn't too far from where you grew up, right?

• 0:43Speaker 02

  Yep, I am a proud product of South Louisiana. And, you know, one of the best things about being from South Louisiana is the culture, especially the music and the people who make it. If you think about Mardi Gras, parades, even funerals in New Orleans, they're followed by what's called a second line. And it's a bunch of people mourning, but also dancing. I think Danavan Calhoun Bettis, he really embodies this.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  Music background, church, school, marching. Your whole life. Your whole life.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  So Bettis grew up in New Orleans 7th Ward. He was a drum major of this super famous Marching 100 band from St. Augustine High School. They're in like Macy's Thanksgiving Parade and things like that.

• 1:25Emily Kwong?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  And he started his first of many brass bands right after he graduated. And Bettis says that his passion for music, it hasn't changed, but the heat has.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  We've had hot summers, you know, especially growing up here, like during the summer. You expect it to get hot. But now it feels like the sun is like right above us.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  And that's not just anecdotal, really. Climate scientists tracking the city's weather patterns say that the average annual temperatures have risen about three or four degrees over the past century. And that's affected everyone in the city, including musicians like Bettis.

• 1:58Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, I mean, Drew, we talked about extreme heat in last month's Nature Quest, looking at the southwest of the US, Arizona. It's also obviously happening all over the country and especially in the southeast where you live. And we felt like this topic deserved more attention.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I agree. Heat kills more people than any other weather event, including floods and hurricanes, which we're no strangers to in Louisiana, right? 51 people died from heat exposure in 2024, and more than 6,000 went to the hospital for heat-related illness. Here's how Jen Brady, a senior data analyst at an independent research group called Climate Central, puts it.

• 2:35Speaker 04

  Heat is the number one weather killer in the US, often overlooked in places like New Orleans because they don't have that visual, all-encompassing impact of a hurricane.

• 2:46Emily Kwong?

  So today on the show, climate change like you've never heard it before. How reporter Drew Hawkins turned heat data into music and brought a live band into the mix. So stick around to hear the tune of rising temperatures. You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 3:09Speaker 05

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  This message comes from University of Buffalo, where scientists are working to protect the Great Lakes and freshwater supplies around the world from harmful contamination. Learn more about their research at buffalo.edu/npr.

• 3:28Speaker 05

  This message comes from Avalara Aviator, the agent hub for tax and compliance. While you've been listening, Aviator could be helping move tax and compliance work forward with purpose-built AI agents and with you still in control. More at avalara.com/aviator. This message comes from BetterHelp. Your brain has limited storage, so why is it still holding on to that embarrassing moment from years ago? BetterHelp is an online therapy platform that gives you space to talk about what's taking up too much of yours. BetterHelp is now in-network with more than 125 health plans, with many copays as low as $15 for eligible members. And if you don't have eligible insurance, you can still get 20% off your first month.

• 4:13Speaker 05

  Visit betterhelp.com/npr. Cost and coverage may vary. Discount cannot be combined with insurance.

• 4:21Emily Kwong?

  All right, short waivers. We are on a nature quest. This is our monthly segment that looks at a local environment and the ways it's changing and what that means for all of us. And this month, we're joined by reporter Drew Hawkins, who lives in New Orleans and is bringing us a very New Orleans, New Orleanian, NOLA way to conceptualize the heat.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Yep. All of those are correct answers. Being from South Louisiana, you know, I know that it's always hot in the summer. But talking with Jen Brady, the Climate Central researcher, she says, "We can actually see that by looking at the temperature trends. It really started to get much hotter, much more quickly around the 1970s and 80s. Greenhouse gases from emissions like fossil fuels and industry and agriculture, they create this blanket as they accumulate in the atmosphere. It traps and it holds the heat. And starting in the 1970s and 80s, as we continued to pump out more and more emissions, that blanket got thicker. And those greenhouse gases, they can really stick around, you know, for years, decades even."

• 5:24Speaker 04

  Now, what we're seeing is sustained year after year after year after year of it getting warmer and warmer. So we're seeing a new trend. So it's levels that we've never seen before.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  You know, one issue that Climate Central and other groups like them often run into is that it can be hard to really represent that data in a way that makes sense to everyday people.

• 5:45Emily Kwong?

  Right.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  So a lot of times what she does and what her team does is they'll use charts or graphs, right? But not everyone is a visual learner, you know what I mean? So I asked her in our interview, "What if we turn that temperature data into something you could listen to?"

• 6:01Speaker 04

  I think it is a really amazing idea, and I think it could be a way to convey the magnitude of it without people having to...

• 6:12Speaker 04

  Understand what a deviation is.

• 6:14Emily Kwong?

  Clearly a brilliant idea, but how did you do it? How did you turn heat data into something that people could listen to? Like, what is that?

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Right, so this is something called sonification. It's actually really simple. So like, if you think of a graph, or a chart, or a map, those are visual ways to look at data and what it means. And sonification is just that, but with sound. And in this case, music, which is a huge part of New Orleans culture. So it just made too much sense, really.

• 6:40Emily Kwong?

  Wait, super into the sonification idea. But Drew, where are you getting all of this data? Like, before you turn it into music?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so what I did was I pulled the average annual temperature data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, right? They've got a ton of climate data for different regions. And in New Orleans, it goes back to 1895.

• 7:00Emily Kwong?

  Okay, so, once you have the data, then what happens next? Like, how do you turn that into some kind of audio representation?

• 7:08Speaker 02

  This was a really challenging part, right? So, data is messy. Temperature changes from year to year, right? I mean, you could think about all those spikes you might see in a line graph. So, the trick here was to take this data, clean it up, and represent it in a way that was still accurate. And for that, I reached out to Dr. Takeshi Akuma. And he's a researcher at LSU who specializes in radio signal analysis. So what I did is I took that raw data, sent it to him, and then we identified the trends in it.

• 7:36Speaker 06

  I mean, really, it looks like, you know, till 1980 or so, it's pretty steady. Like, if you just take out the spiking as the general trend, there's a little dip around 1960s, 1970s or so. Then it just goes up.

• 7:53Emily Kwong?

  Like, the average is trending up?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Exactly. I mean, you know, I was also lucky because in addition to being a researcher who specializes in sound and vocal tones and things like that, he also happens to be an amateur composer. So he actually helped me take the heat data and transpose that onto sheet music that I could then use and give to a band to play.

• 8:13Emily Kwong?

  Okay, so you had your scientific transposer. Now, I suppose you just needed your musicians for this audacious plan. Once you got everything mapped onto sheet music, where did you find the band?

• 8:24Speaker 02

  You know, audacious is a good way to put it. I feel like every step of the way was like this grand scheme of how do I do this next? Right? And you know, you can't have music without a band. So for this part, I reached out to a local musician named Donovan Calhoun Bettis, and that's who you heard at the top of the show.

• 8:38Emily Kwong?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  So for this, he's going to be our musician guide, our musical expert. Bettis is the leader of a brass band called Bettis and Third Degree, and they're all local New Orleans musicians, all born and bred here in the city.

• 8:51Emily Kwong?

  What did you do? Did you go to their band hall? What happened next?

• 8:55Speaker 02

  What was the next step of my audacious plan? Yes.

• 8:57Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  So, once we got everybody's schedules lined up and got things figured out, we met up at a small jazz club.

• 9:04Emily Kwong?

  Oh, fun.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was called the Algiers Music and Artist Studio. It was a hot August Saturday evening. We went over all of the data, the sheet music, talked through everything with the band. And then really, I just kind of sat back and they did their thing and I just recorded. It was just this incredible thing to watch and listen to.

• 9:22Emily Kwong?

  I've never been so excited for a data drop.

• 9:32Emily Kwong?

  Drew, can you just walk us through, like, what are we hearing right now? Like, what does it mean?

• 9:35Speaker 02

  This is a song called "Joe Avery's Blues." It's a classic second-line song in New Orleans. It's often played in parades and special events like funerals. And what I want you guys to pay attention to here is the tempo, the speed. So what you're hearing right now is the representation of the first 75 years or so of average annual temperature data. And like you can hear with those different instruments, that data can fluctuate, but the temperature tempo beneath it is stable, barely increasing. But then by the 1980s, the temperature starts to go up more quickly.

• 10:07Emily Kwong?

  Okay, so the speed of the music matches the rate of the rising average temperature. Is that right?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly what's happening.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  And then between 1980 and 2000, the average annual temperature in New Orleans goes up by more than a quarter of a degree. And that might not seem like much if you're just looking at the data, you know, in a spreadsheet, but it's a significant increase.

• 10:34Speaker 07

  Whoa, wait, why is it getting faster now?

• 10:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, so now we're getting into the data for the 2000s because between 2000 and 2015, the average annual temperature jumps by another half of a degree. So we're almost a full degree warmer than the first 75 years of data.

• 10:49Speaker 07

  It's like frenetic.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  And guys, this is where things really start to pick up.

• 10:56Emily Kwong?

  I'm sweating. I'm actually sweating listening to this.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  This is the data in the last decade and the rate at which the temperature is increasing has accelerated even more. We're talking almost a degree and a half since the 2000s, two degrees more than the 1980s. And the thing is, many climate scientists say that it's getting faster.

• 11:15Speaker 07

  Oh my goodness. I mean, I can totally hear how the heat increase is affecting the music. This kind of temperature tempo, I think you called it earlier, Drew. But I imagine the heat is also affecting the musicians, right?

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure. I mean, like, this is something I talked to the band about as well. They've talked about how hot it is to march in parades now or play gigs outside. Some of them said that they used to be able to play all day in the summertime, but now they try to wait until it's later in the day when it's cooler. You know, there are few of them perform on the street in the French Quarter. And they've seen musicians and tourists passed out when they get overheated. They said that you can actually hear it when a band is hot. The music is duller. Dehydration makes it harder to form the embouchure. That's the shape of the mouth that you need to play wind and brass instruments.

• 11:59Emily Kwong?

  Climate change is hurting New Orleans music. I don't like this.

• 12:02Speaker 07

  Me neither. And I imagine all of this puts them more at risk for things like heat exhaustion and heat stroke.

• 12:08Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, which is dangerous. I mean, we talked about this a lot in Last Nature Quest, but especially with humidity, the human body is not as efficient at cooling itself off. But knowing Bettis as you do, I bet he's not going to quit playing music altogether, even with the heat.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say these guys are hard to stop, right? I mean, in addition to being a professional musician, Bettis is also what's known in New Orleans as a culture bearer. And these are people who preserve and maintain the city's unique traditions. And the way he put it was exactly, Emily, you know, the heat, it may not stop them from what they're doing, but many of them also don't really have a choice. They can't turn down gigs. There was this survey that was done by a local group that found that the average income for the city's musicians before the pandemic was just under $28,000 a year. So Bettis says, you know, the heat really affects everything, including the culture.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  I don't even see what the preventative measures are or could be to like, continue the culture the way we do it and still not like pass out, you know, be in sweltering heat the entire time.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  You know, the heat doesn't just affect the musicians. It's everybody that lives there, whether they live outside, they work outside, they don't have AC in their home, which is maybe a lot more people than you might realize.

• 13:22Emily Kwong?

  Totally. Though preventative measures can exist, what's happening in New Orleans around extreme heat?

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Local officials here, they've done things like open cooling centers, they've provided mobile cooling centers where they take buses and run the AC. They've set up overnight shelters for unhoused people. And, you know, a lot of those solutions, they really aren't perfect, but it does clearly show that officials recognize how dangerous the heat is becoming. And that heat, it's ongoing, it's continuing. Even if we stopped all emissions, like today, the temperature in New Orleans could still continue to rise for decades to come. I mean, I cover heat every summer, right? And I think helping people understand the impacts, whether it's offering safety tips, basic stuff like that, or fun, audacious things like sonifying data like this, it's

• 14:12Speaker 02

  something I think we should continue to do.

• 14:14Speaker 07

  No, that totally makes sense. Drew, thank you for bringing this dedicated reporting to our show and our listeners.

• 14:21Emily Kwong?

  Yes, and helping us feel the climate change in our bones.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  Thank you, guys, for having me. This was a lot of fun to work with you guys on.

• 14:28Speaker 07

  This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and the audio engineer was Jimmy Keely. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Hannah Chin.

• 14:40Emily Kwong?

  And I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.