Want to Listen to Climate Change?

Have you ever wondered what climate change sounds like? Before you ask — no — it's not the cries of those losing homes to sea level rise or wildfire. It's these new audio tracks (called songs, though I'm not sure I would go quite that far) by students from Full Sail University in Florida through a project with USA Today.

Musicians turned 100 years of rainfall data, and the changes we're already seeing, into something that we can truly hear. My personal favorites are Michigan, Iowa, and Arkansas by Marc Pinsky. They sound like film scores with their dramatic shifts in particularly wet or dry years. While not a song in the way I usually talk about in pop culture, they also have a clearer tie to climate change. We're not doing a deep dive lyrical analysis here; you can literally just listen. The data is all right there.

Precipitation is one of the biggest changes that will come with climate change — we're already seeing it. On the whole, we're paradoxically expecting more droughts AND more extreme storms, because rather than the predictable precipitation we've come to know (and maybe love?), things are becoming less predictable and more extreme. This has life and death consequences,that we hope you'll take seriously by heading to the Climate Action Explorer to take action.

But maybe, in the meantime, just take a moment  listen.