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Now You Can "Hear" Climate Change [Video]

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


Want a visceral sense of how much temperatures around the Northern Hemisphere are deviating from average? Well, have a listen. University of Minnesota geography student and super cello player Daniel Crawford has composed a two-and-a-half minute piece for string quartet that let’s you hear the temperature change from 1880 to 2014. The tones in the early years feel placid and regular but from 1950 on they depart more from the norm, and they become notably scattered from the 1990s through 2014.

The sound of climate change from the Amazon to the Arctic from Ensia on Vimeo.


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In the video, titled Planetary Bands, Warming World, each instrument represents a region of the hemisphere. The cello plays the data from the equatorial zone, the viola the mid-latitudes, one violin the high latitudes and another violin the Arctic. The pitch of each note represents the average annual temperature of the region for the relevant year. For example, a high note on the violin means warm weather in the Arctic; a low note on the cello means cold weather along the equator. Blend all four, and you can hear how temperatures fluctuate across the hemisphere and how much they have risen.

Crawford partnered with geography professor Scott St. George to create a video of the composition, performed by students Julian Maddox, Jason Shu, Alastair Witherspoon and Nygel Witherspoon at the university’s School of Music. As the four artists, seated left to right facing the viewer, play the piece the years tick by below them in time with the notes, and the temperature of each of the zones scrolls by above the musician, along with a slick little graphic that swings up and down to show the relative change year to year.

I met Crawford two years ago at a climate meeting, where he unveiled a solo composition he had done just for cello, based on the same data. To hear a brief Q&A with him, and to hear him play his original composition, A Song for Our Warming Planet, which he did privately for me the day he announced it, you can listen to my podcast from August 2013.

Credits: Support for the video was provided by the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment and the College of Liberal Arts. The video was produced by Mighteor

Mark Fischetti has been a senior editor at Scientific American for 17 years and has covered sustainability issues, including climate, weather, environment, energy, food, water, biodiversity, population, and more. He assigns and edits feature articles, commentaries and news by journalists and scientists and also writes in those formats. He edits History, the magazine's department looking at science advances throughout time. He was founding managing editor of two spinoff magazines: Scientific American Mind and Scientific American Earth 3.0. His 2001 freelance article for the magazine, "Drowning New Orleans," predicted the widespread disaster that a storm like Hurricane Katrina would impose on the city. His video What Happens to Your Body after You Die?, has more than 12 million views on YouTube. Fischetti has written freelance articles for the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Fast Company, and many others. He co-authored the book Weaving the Web with Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, which tells the real story of how the Web was created. He also co-authored The New Killer Diseases with microbiologist Elinor Levy. Fischetti is a former managing editor of IEEE Spectrum Magazine and of Family Business Magazine. He has a physics degree and has twice served as the Attaway Fellow in Civic Culture at Centenary College of Louisiana, which awarded him an honorary doctorate. In 2021 he received the American Geophysical Union's Robert C. Cowen Award for Sustained Achievement in Science Journalism, which celebrates a career of outstanding reporting on the Earth and space sciences. He has appeared on NBC's Meet the Press, CNN, the History Channel, NPR News and many news radio stations. Follow Fischetti on X (formerly Twitter) @markfischetti

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