Nature Quest: What Does Climate Change Sound Like?

Summary

Short Wave Podcast Summary

Episode: Nature Quest: What Does Climate Change Sound Like?

Date: August 26, 2025
Hosts: Emily Kwong, Hannah Chen
Guest Reporter: Drew Hawkins
Featured Experts/Musicians: Danavan Calhoun Bettis, Dr. Takeshi Okuma, Jen Brady

Overview

This episode of Short Wave takes a creative dive into how climate change can be understood—and felt—through sound. Reporter Drew Hawkins joins the hosts from New Orleans to explore how rising temperatures are impacting local culture, in particular the storied music scene. The episode’s centerpiece is the sonification of over a century’s worth of temperature data from New Orleans, performed by a live brass band. The hosts, along with Hawkins, discuss both the science and lived experience of climate change in the birthplace of jazz.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. New Orleans Culture & Climate Change

• Drew Hawkins, a native of South Louisiana, introduces listeners to the city’s rich musical traditions, especially brass bands and “second lines.”
  • “If you think about Mardi Gras, parades, even funerals in New Orleans, they're followed by what's called a second line... mourning, but also dancing.” — Drew Hawkins (00:47)
• Musician Danavan Calhoun Bettis describes how increasing heat is changing what it means to play and perform in New Orleans.
  • “We’ve had hot summers ... but now it feels like the sun is, like, right above us.” — Danavan Calhoun Bettis (01:40)

2. Extreme Heat as a Hidden Killer

• Climate analyst Jen Brady highlights how fatal heat is, outpacing other weather threats.
  • “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... impact of a hurricane.” — Jen Brady (02:38)
• Recent statistics: In 2024, 51 heat-related deaths and over 6,000 hospitalizations in Louisiana.

3. Translating Data into Music (Sonification)

• Hawkins describes “sonification,” the process of converting data (average annual temps from NOAA, 1895-present) into musical notation and then performance.
  • “Sonification is just that, but with sound and in this case, music, which is a huge part of New Orleans culture.” — Drew Hawkins (06:22)
• Worked with Dr. Takeshi Okuma, an LSU researcher and amateur composer, to clean and transpose temperature data onto sheet music.
  • “It looks like... till 1980 or so, it's pretty steady...then it just goes up.” — Dr. Takeshi Okuma (07:38)

4. Bringing Data to Life: The Band Performs Climate Change

• The local brass band led by Danavan Calhoun Bettis performs “Joe Avery’s Blues,” mapping temperature increases onto changes in tempo.
  • First 75 years: Slow, steady tempo mirrors stable average temperatures. (09:37)
  • 1980s: Noticeable uptick in the pace, reflecting faster warming.
  • “So the speed of the music matches the rate of rising average temperature. Is that right?”
    “Yes, exactly.”
    — Emily Kwong & Drew Hawkins (10:09–10:13)
  • 2000–2015: Even quicker tempo, symbolizing a half-degree jump in annual temperature.
  • “It's like, frenetic.” — Hannah Chen (10:50)
  • 2015–Present: Accelerated tempo represents a 1.5–2 degree increase since the 1980s.

5. Impact of Heat on Musicians

• Heat is affecting musicians’ endurance, sound quality, and safety.
  • “Some said they used to be able to play all day... now they try to wait until it’s cooler... you can actually hear it when a band is hot, the music is duller.” — Drew Hawkins (11:28)
• Heat-related challenges are not just about comfort; dehydration interferes with the formation of the “embouchure,” essential for brass and wind players.

6. Economic and Cultural Vulnerabilities

• Musicians are culture bearers but face tough choices: they can’t easily turn down gigs despite the heat, with average pre-pandemic musician incomes at $28,000/year.
  • “I don’t even see what the preventative measures are or could be... and still not pass out, you know, be in sweltering heat the entire time.” — Danavan Calhoun Bettis (13:02)

7. Community and Government Response

• Officials have opened cooling centers, set up mobile cooling buses, and provided shelters for unhoused residents. But these solutions are far from perfect and underscore the persistent threat.
  • “Even if we stopped all emissions like today, the temperature in New Orleans could still continue to rise for decades to come.” — Drew Hawkins (13:29)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “We've had hot summers... now it feels like the sun is, like, right above us.” — Danavan Calhoun Bettis (01:40)
• “Heat is the number one weather killer in the U.S., often overlooked...” — Jen Brady (02:38)
• “Sonification... could be a way to convey the magnitude of it without people having to understand what a deviation is.” — Jen Brady (06:02)
• “You can actually hear it when a band is hot, the music is duller.” — Drew Hawkins (11:28)
• “Climate change is hurting New Orleans music. I don’t like this.” — Emily Kwong (12:01)
• “Even if we stopped all emissions today, the temperature in New Orleans could still continue to rise for decades to come.” — Drew Hawkins (13:29)

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Notable Segment Timestamps

• 00:46–01:19 — Introduction to New Orleans culture and musician Danavan Calhoun Bettis.
• 02:38 — Jen Brady explains why heat is an underestimated threat.
• 04:44–06:22 — How rising temperatures are recorded and why sonification makes data accessible.
• 07:38 — Dr. Okuma identifies warming trend in the data.
• 09:33–11:16 — The band performs climate data as music, with Hawkins narrating the transitions between decades.
• 11:28–13:02 — Direct impacts of heat on musicians’ health, performance, and livelihood.
• 13:24–13:29 — Discussion of local mitigation efforts and persistent challenges.

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Tone & Style

• The discussion is lively, inquisitive, and friendly—mixing accessible science explanations, local culture, and personal anecdotes. There’s humor, empathy, and a sense of both urgency and admiration for New Orleans’ resilience.

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Summary

In under 15 minutes, this episode delivers a creative lens on climate science by translating rising temperatures into New Orleans jazz, helping listeners feel the data as well as understand it. The musical experiment is both poignant and informative: It not only demonstrates in sound how much the climate is changing, but also spotlights the real vulnerabilities musicians and communities face as the city heats up. The hosts and guests leave listeners with a renewed appreciation for both the data and the deeply human culture that’s at risk.

Transcript

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[Emily Kwong]

You're listening to Short Wave from npr. 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.

[Drew Hawkins]

Hey, Emily. Hey, Han. Hey, great to be here.

[Hannah Chen]

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

[Drew Hawkins]

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 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 music.

[Danavan Calhoun Bettis]

Background, church, school, marching your whole life. Whole life. Whole life.

[Drew Hawkins]

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 Thanksgiving Parade and things like that. 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.

[Danavan Calhoun Bettis]

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.

[Drew Hawkins]

And that's not just anecdotal, really. Climate scientists tracking the city's weather patterns say that the average annual temperatures have risen about 3 or 4 degrees over the past century. And that's affected everyone in the city, including musicians like. Like Bettis.

[Emily Kwong]

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.

[Drew Hawkins]

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.

[Jen Brady]

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.

[Hannah Chen]

So today on the show, climate change like you've never heard it before.

[Emily Kwong]

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 shortwave from npr.

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[Emily Kwong]

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.

[Drew Hawkins]

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.

[Jen Brady]

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.

[Drew Hawkins]

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. Um, 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 turned that temperature data into something you could listen to?

[Jen Brady]

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.

[Emily 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?

[Drew Hawkins]

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.

[Hannah Chen]

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

[Drew Hawkins]

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.

[Hannah Chen]

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

[Drew Hawkins]

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 represent it in a way that was still accurate. And for that, I reached out to Dr. Takeshi Okuma, 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.

[Dr. Takeshi Okuma]

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

[Emily Kwong]

Like, the average is trending up.

[Drew Hawkins]

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.

[Emily 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?

[Drew Hawkins]

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 Danavan Calhoun Bettis, and that's who you heard at the top of. So for this, he's gonna 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.

[Emily Kwong]

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

[Drew Hawkins]

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. 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.

[Emily Kwong]

I've never been so excited for a day to drop.

[Hannah Chen]

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

[Drew Hawkins]

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.

[Emily Kwong]

So the speed of the music matches the rate of the rising average temperature. Is that right?

[Drew Hawkins]

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.

[Hannah Chen]

Whoa, wait, why is it getting faster now?

[Drew Hawkins]

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.

[Hannah Chen]

It's like, frenetic.

[Drew Hawkins]

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

[Emily Kwong]

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

[Drew Hawkins]

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.

[Hannah Chen]

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?

[Drew Hawkins]

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 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 emboucher. That's the shape of the mouth that you need to play wind and brass instruments.

[Emily Kwong]

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

[Hannah Chen]

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

[Emily 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.

[Drew Hawkins]

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 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.

[Danavan Calhoun Bettis]

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.

[Drew Hawkins]

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.

[Emily Kwong]

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

[Drew Hawkins]

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.

[Hannah Chen]

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

[Drew Hawkins]

Yes.

[Emily Kwong]

And helping us feel the climate change in our bones.

[Drew Hawkins]

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

[Emily Kwong]

This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and the audio engineer was Jimmy Keeley.

[Hannah Chen]

Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Hannah Chin.

[Emily Kwong]

And I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to shortwave from npr.

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