Short Wave - Nature Quest: What Does Climate Change Sound Like?

Episode Date: August 26, 2025

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 [e-mail] 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.See 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

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, everyone. Emily Kwong here and Hannah Chin. And this month's NatureQuest is a little different because we are joined by a special guest, public health reporter Drew Hawkins from the Gulf States Newsroom. Hey, Drew. Hey, Emily. Hey, Han. Great to be here. And Drew, you're calling in from New Orleans, which isn't too far from where you grew up, right?

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, braids, 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. Music, background, church, school, marching. It's all life. Yeah.

All life. 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. Oh, my goodness. 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. 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 it. 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. Yeah, I mean, Drew, we talked about extreme heat in last month's nature quest, looking at the southwest of the U.S., 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. Yeah, I mean, I agree.

Heat kills more people than any other weather events, including floods and hurricanes, which were 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. Heat is the number one weather killer in the U.S. often overlooked in places like New Orleans because they don't have that visual, all-encompassing impact of a hurricane. So today on the show, climate change, like you've never heard it before. How a 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 Shortwave from NPR. All right, shortwavers. 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, Noralian, Nola way to conceptualize the heat. Yep. All 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. 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. 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. 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? 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 understand what a deviation is. 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? 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. Wait, see, we're into the sonification idea. But Drew, where are you getting all of this data, like before you turn it into music? 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. Okay, so once you have the data, then what happens next?

Like, how do you turn that into some kind of audio representation? This was a really challenging part, right? So data is messy. Temperature changes from year to year, right? I mean, if you 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 represented 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. I mean, really, it looks like, you know, until 1980 or so, it's pretty steady. Like, if you just take out to spiking us, the general trend, it's a little bit around 1960s, 1970 or so then it just goes up. Like the average is trending up. 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. 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? You know, audacious is a good way to put it. I feel like every step of the way it 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 Danavan Calhoun Bettis. And that's

who you heard at the top of the show. So for this, he's going to be our musician guide, our musical expert. Betis 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. What did you do? Did you go to their band hall? What happened next? What was the next step of my audacious plan? Yes. So once we got everybody's schedules lined up and got things figured out, we met up at a small jazz club. Oh, fun. 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.

I've never been so excited for a day to drop. Drew, can you just walk us through? Like, what are we hearing right now? Like, what does it mean? 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 70s. 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. So the speed of the music matches the rate of the rising average temperature. Is that right? Yes, exactly what's happening.

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. Whoa, wait. Why is it getting faster now? 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. It's like frenetic. And guys, this is where things really start to pick up. I'm sweating. I'm actually sweating, listening to this. 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. 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? Oh, for sure. I mean, like, this is something I talked to the band about as well. They 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, a few of them perform on the street in the French Quarter. And they've seen musicians and tourists pass 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 emboucher. That's the shape of the mouth that you need to pull. play wind and brass instruments? Climate change is hurting New Orleans music. I don't like this. Me neither.

And I imagine all of this puts them more at risk for things like heat exhaustion and heat stroke. 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. Yeah, I would say these guys are hard to stop, right? I mean, in addition to being a professional musician, Bennis 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 a 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. 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. 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. Totally. Though preventative measures can exist. What's happening in New Orleans around extreme heat? 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 something I think we should continue to do. No, that totally makes sense. Drew, thank you for bringing this dedicated reporting

to our show and our listeners. Yes, and helping us feel the climate change in our boats. Thank you guys for having me. This was a lot of fun to work with you guys on. 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. And I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.