Climate data is overwhelming. And being inundated with numbers can make you feel disconnected or even hopeless, especially if you’re not a mathematician or a scientist. So, how can we help people connect with important data sets like the Keeling Curve or the satellite record of Arctic Sea ice? Is there a way to transform the data into art, giving people a new way to talk about climate change?
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, it’s Ross from Reversing Climate Change. I wanted to let you know that we have a new podcast called Carbon Removal Newsroom. It’s short form, it’s timely, and it’s all about carbon removal. Whenever we see a good news story about carbon removal, or that should be about carbon removal, we’re going to record a short episode about it with a rotating cast of guests. So please subscribe to Carbon Removal Newsroom, check it out in your podcast app of choice, and thank you so much for your support.
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jospe and Paul Gamble is back. Producer Paul. Welcome. We missed you.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. Yeah, you did.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. It’s great to have you back. We’re in Seattle. We have an episode unlike any other that we have previously done. It is about the collision between art, data, and climate. Why don’t you introduce our guest, Christophe?
Christophe Jospe: I’m super excited to do this episode. I hope you’re excited too, listener. We had read a Crosscut article that featured her work and then dug a little further and started listening to these really cool musical pieces. Thank you so much. And Judy, first of all, welcome. Welcome to Nori. Welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. And you very kindly listened to some of our shows before. So you know that we like to start off with people’s story and their motivations. So how did you get to where you are today?
Judy Twedt: Yeah. So thanks for having me on the podcast. It’s great to be here chatting on this sunny morning with you about this. So my story, there’s lots of ways to tell that, but I grew up in Tacoma, as I said earlier, in Tacoma, Washington. I’ll say a little about my family background. On my mom’s side, we’re fifth generation Washingtonians and we’re white settlers here and worked for several generations as loggers in the Olympic Peninsula. In the timber industry. On my dad’s side, farmers in southeastern South Dakota. So both sides of my family had pretty strong connections to land practices and land use and land management.
But I grew up in a family of musicians. Most of my parents are music teachers and had a lot of influence in music in my family, both through music education and also through sacred music. My family was Presbyterian and Lutheran and we were involved in a lot of Creation and production of church music. So that was part of the background of my life. And then growing up in Western Washington, the best parts of my childhood were undeniably being outside in the summers in particular. Hiking in both the Cascades and the Olympics and swimming in the Puget Sound.
And yes, I did swim regularly in the cold waters of the Puget Sound. So that set a lot of my interest in the natural world. And I had a very circuitous route to where I’m at today. There’s a very long version and a shorter version. We’ll just start with the shorter version and then if you want to ask more questions, we can get into the long version. I decided in my late 20s to do a career shift and I wanted to study or do work in environmental sciences, which was something I had been interested in when I was young.
So this career shift brought me back to Tacoma. I took classes at Tacoma Community College for a couple years. Math and physics just loved it more than I More than I realized I would and found my way into a doctoral program in atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, which is not my current program now. But I started in this doctoral program because I wanted to study climate change. I’ve always liked thinking about big picture problems. So I finished my master’s in atmospheric sciences studying these really cool things. Giant waves in the atmosphere that connect tropical oceans to polar climate.
So this is climate modeling work. And that was really intellectually satisfying to me, but I was also paying a lot of attention to the discussion around climate change and obviously the polarization. I was doing also a lot of outreach work. In communities. And I taught my first undergraduate class for non-majors, non-science majors in global warming. And I realized that while teaching that class, you know, students were inundated with scientific data for 10 weeks. And by the end of it, they had, you know, a better grasp of the science, but also there was no way for them to really process on an emotional level what they were learning.
And I saw that there was a deep craving for that. And survey students said they We’re feeling angry and hopeless. And so we started making soundtracks out of climate data. I said, maybe a different modality can help us access this information in a different way. And that led me through a series of events to designing a doctoral program where I can focus on this full time. And that’s what I’m doing now.
Christophe Jospe: Wow. It’s kind of living the dream. Ross, you got a question there?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, how does one do this or actually maybe priming the audience just with letting them listen to this might be the best place to start. And then we can dive in from there. So I’m going to set this up real quick, but I think we’ll probably just splice in the actual good audio version of this. Judy, what was that? What did you sonically personify there?
Judy Twedt: Yeah. So it’s interesting that we played it first. I often say that playing a piece before talking about it is like showing a graph without any labels or axes or like the lines. Like you don’t actually know how to interpret it. So I will do that for us now. So what we were listening to is the satellite record of Arctic sea ice over the last 36 years. So satellites went up into orbit in the late 70s and they’ve been monitoring the area of ice cover over the Arctic Ocean. And so if you look at that data, you see it going down in time.
Now, importantly, this data is specifically like looking at, we call this the Arctic sea ice anomaly. So we basically want to see, is it above or below average? So this data set that I sonified and that you just listened to is like if you subtract the long-term average from every month of data, Then you hear that up and down there. So you heard a couple different things going on. So this was written for a piano performer and the pianist playing that piece was Christina Lee. She’s a local performing artist. Her left hand was playing those chords.
And visually, if you see the performance, you’ll see that the left hand is kind of doing those four chords repeated over and over in the middle of the keyboard. And each chord represents the season. So you hear the seasonal cycle. The location of the left hand and those chords on the keyboard represents about where that long-term average is. And that’s the only thing the left hand does is just repeats the seasonal cycle. The right hand is playing each note is one month of data. So there’s three notes in the right hand for every chord in the left hand.
And if you hear the right hand higher than the left hand, you know that month sea ice was above average. And if you hear, and you can also see it in visual performance, if the right hand is crossed over and below the left hand, then in that month, sea ice was below its long-term average. So over the course of that piece, the right hand just is going down and down. Not monotonically, it goes up and down, but over time, it’s continually going lower and lower until the last 15 years of the piece, it’s continuously moving.
Below the right hand is crossed over the left hand. Sea ice has been below its long-term average. It’s entered a new regime.
Ross Kenyon: So why bother doing it this way? Does it help people to understand it in a new way? I guess anecdotally, I don’t know if you have more sophisticated data than that, but does this help people understand climate change or address it in some new way?
Judy Twedt: Mm-hmm. Well, again, going back to my experience teaching climate change for large lecture classes of undergraduates who, you know, wanted to understand it, but they weren’t science majors. There is a real need to sort of be able to connect with the most clear and important data sets that I think of them as canonical data sets of climate change. And that is the satellite record of sea ice. That’s the Keeling curve, which shows the change in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since 1958, ice core records. These are things that show clear, undeniable evidence of climate change and that we need ways to connect with them that are more resonant because there’s so much data in our lives.
But how do we know which ones that stand above the rest and kind of help us get a big picture, like long view understanding of how the climate is changing? And the sea ice record is one of those. Sea ice is important to me in particular. I mean, I’ve done research in the Arctic on icebreakers and seen it, but it’s also important to us like globally, even if you don’t live and are never going to go visit the Arctic Ocean, it acts like planetary sunblock. And so there’s lots of stories to tell about the impacts of this loss of sea ice, but we don’t really connect with them unless we have ways of having an emotional response to what the satellites and what the data is telling us.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting talking about sea ice and thinking of the depth or thickness of it. Of course, in the wintertime, the sea ice grows. So you have this new ice, but you also have this old long-term ice and we’re losing that. And then we’re also, it’s getting much smaller, much more quickly. Can the satellites tell in terms of depth as well? Does that...
Judy Twedt: The satellites aren’t able to tell very clearly how the sea ice thickness is changing. We have estimates of that from observations, in situ observations. And that’s from scientists who do research expeditions in the Arctic in the summertime in particular. And yes, the volume of ice and the thickness of ice is also dramatically decreasing. But that’s not portrayed in the piece that we just listened to. That piece was only showing the ice area. And the summer that I was up on a research expedition on a Canadian icebreaker, it was really interesting to hear the crew, the ship’s crew, you know, talking about the loss of thick ice, that it was really easy to navigate through the Arctic Ocean now and the thinner ice is just much easier to navigate through.
Ross Kenyon: Well, your comments about trying to find an emotional connection to what is often an overwhelming amount of data that causes paralysis. I think if I wasn’t doing Nori, I’d probably just ignore climate change stuff more or less. If I wasn’t feeling like I was moving the needle at all on it, it’d be better to spend my time elsewhere, perhaps, unless I felt like I could move the needle somewhere else in this space. So I don’t necessarily blame anyone for doing so. And then it’s just hard to, yeah, it’s hard to move the needle.
But generating a new kind of response seems good. And that’s what we do with this podcast. We try to make it, I don’t know, our tone. We try to do optimistic. They’re solution oriented. We try to bring a lot of humor.
Unknown speaker: Ross, you need to show, don’t tell. So come on, man.
Ross Kenyon: I’m laying the playbook out.
Paul Gambill: Can I? Can I jump in here? When we were listening to that, I noticed I think it was probably around a minute 45 into it. It went from a very like pleasing sounding piece to all of a sudden the I guess what she’s playing on her right hand just became very dissonant with those chords. What did that represent? What was happening there?
Judy Twedt: Mm hmm. Yeah, I’ll answer that question and then we can come back to the other one about kind of hope and despair. I’m glad you picked up on that. So there are two different key changes in the piece and that’s when you hear that increased dissonance. And those are reflecting when the ice starts to enter. And so, to show that transition... I used a key change first when like a few months of the year are statistical outliers and then the second key change is when the majority of the months of the year are statistical outliers so that you can hear that shift as well.
And I think that questions about people’s response and, you know, that’s easy to feel completely overwhelmed is real and that, you know, we don’t know what the future will look like and we need to be able to talk about it more. We need to be able to talk about it from different perspectives. The fact that people often do have a very strong emotional response that sometimes causes shutdown is largely because we really do deeply care about this issue and we have connections, maybe personal or family or otherwise, to the places that we love and we don’t want to see them change.
And so we need to be able to open up conversations that are, you know, Below the extreme polarization that happens so often in media and have more open-ended conversations about this. And I think that bringing in more modalities by bringing in music and doing new forms of art, combining art with science to talk about the data can help create those kinds of conversational spaces like the one we’re having now where we’re just approaching it from slightly different angles.
Christophe Jospe: One of the things that I really appreciate about those comments and also a comment that you made in the TED talk that you gave in Seattle was that the idea or the hope here is that you’re giving people hope, you’re giving people agency. So can you explain that for me? How does that work?
Judy Twedt: Well, a couple of things. So the theme of conversations of talking about climate change is something that’s really we’re hearing a lot about. One of my favorite climate scientists who’s also a really world renowned communicator of climate science is Catherine Hayhoe. And she also just gave a TED talk about having conversations about climate change, the need to do that. And I think that in and of itself to be able to sort of engage in this in conversation about climate change can be empowering. Partly because it, you know, initially can be difficult.
The summer when I first started making soundtracks, before I had any idea that it would turn into what it is now, and it was just like, let me experiment and see if this works. I was also reading a lot of literature on science communication, and I was really moved by this book by a sociologist called Living in Denial, and her name will come to me as I’m talking about it. She works in Oregon, and she was working with a Very different kind of culture than in the U. S. , strong civic engagement and strong connection to the outdoors.
There was no denial of the science of climate change in this community. She was interviewing them during a very warm winter. And she noted that there was this conversational dead space when she would interview... Members of this community about climate change. And it was kind of for the reason you’re saying, it’s like it can be so overwhelming. So that’s a real, like addressing our collective inability to have real honest conversations about something that’s, you know, unprecedented in human history. It’s really important. We don’t know exactly how to do this, but every kind of new approach is, you know, a really important experiment.
Ross Kenyon: Definitely. And in our small way, we definitely try to have voices on the podcast that we have plenty of more conventional environmental people who I’m sure are left of center relatively. And then we’ve had conservative and libertarian guests on too who also care about the environment and their approaches for doing so. And we try to Give as good as we get. And we push back on people when we feel like we need to. But I always want to avoid whenever we should have a conversation about this comes up, I always think of, have you seen the new Sacha Baron Cohen show, Who is America?
Judy Twedt: No.
Ross Kenyon: Did you ever watch Ali G? You ever watch any of those?
Judy Twedt: No.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Well, then it might be shocking to start now, but... He mostly satirizes right wing America in the show, but he has one character who’s sort of this like very, very silly left wing guy. And his whole thing is like having conversations with America. But the point of it is to talk to conservatives to show them how they’re stupid. And I always wonder, how do you actually have an egalitarian discussion between different ideologies that isn’t patronizing? We try, and sometimes we may be unfair. There’s definitely episodes of the podcast where I was like, I should have been a little cooler about that one comment, but I had to get my bit in.
How have you done it? Do you feel like you’ve always been successful at it, or is it just something that you’re growing into? How do you do it?
Judy Twedt: Mm-hmm. Well, there’s lots of approaches to this. And my, I mean, I guess my answer to this comes not necessarily from making climate music, but from other experiences too. And reading the literature that a lot of our responses to really difficult issues, a lot of our responses to hearing information about really difficult issues are very much dependent on whether or not we trust the person who we’re talking to. And that we’re extremely good at filtering and raising flags if we think this person doesn’t fit in with my worldview or my identity.
And so it’s really important that you kind of pick and choose your conversations with people and that you really value relationship. And that you honor where everybody’s coming from and what their value systems are and recognize that there might be very different relationships. Ways of approaching climate change from different value systems that still acknowledge that, you know, it’s something we have to adapt to and hopefully mitigate as soon as possible. I think it’s important we not try and change people’s identities, but we try and recognize where there’s areas of overlapping concern.
Ross Kenyon: I’m sorry. I’m clearly just setting Paul up here. I was trying to give him the podcaster’s eyes, be like, it’s your turn.
Paul Gambill: And here’s your quarterly announcement about a book that we think everyone should read.
Ross Kenyon: You read my eyes correctly, yes.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, I totally agree with you that it comes down to like meeting people where their values are. We have mentioned this probably seven or eight times on the podcast before. So if you haven’t, if you’ve been listening and you haven’t yet read this book, what are you doing? It’s called The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Do you know that book?
Judy Twedt: I have not read it yet.
Paul Gambill: Haidt is a moral foundations psychology researcher. And he has demonstrated through empirical study that humans, no matter what culture they’re from, no matter where they’re from, tend to hold a set of values in differing levels of importance to them. And if you’re not speaking to those values, then the people you’re talking to aren’t hearing you at all. And you could have a topic like climate change that could be spoken about in these different values in different ways. So let me see if I can get these right.
Ross Kenyon: You’re so hard on yourself. You don’t have to do this.
Paul Gambill: No, Lorraine gave me a great mnemonic that I’m trying to remember now. I think it’s CS Fall. So it’s caring, sanctity, fairness, authority, liberty, and so close. Every time I get five out of six. So speaking to people about climate change, you could talk to them about the fairness of what are we doing to future generations. You could talk to them about the sanctity, like how are we impacting the earth that we’re all a part of? And those messages reach different people in different ways.
Christophe Jospe: So I want to take that framework and put it back on you as someone who comes from many generations of Washingtonians and a history of loggers.
Unknown speaker: Mm-hmm.
Christophe Jospe: How do loggers see the issue of climate change? And how have you sort of internalized that or thought about the logging industry?
Judy Twedt: My family’s work in the timber industry ended with my grandparents’ generation. And then my parents are not actively working in logging. They are music teachers, as I said. So I think about that more and just thinking, reflecting on my own background and what I’m bringing to this is that I You know, my own story is one of, you know, participating in vast land use changes. And also sort of the flip side of the coin is also feeling very connected to the land here. And I have not had active, I have not, you know, brought these pieces to logging towns.
And so I can’t speak to what the logging community says here.
Christophe Jospe: Fair enough.
Judy Twedt: Yeah. I do have really interesting conversations though. So I, you know, I’m a doctoral student at the University of Washington and we have A labor union and we are part of the labor community in King County and I am very active in a climate caucus there in which we have conversations across many different industries and workers and impacted industries and that’s a space that I find incredibly rewarding to have conversations Dr. Anneke Vandenbroek I encourage people to connect with civic communities and find spaces where they can have conversations, whether it’s if they’re a member of a labor community or their church community or any other kind of civic network.
That’s a great place to get outside of our bubbles and have conversations with people and learn something different. Really, really rewarding too.
Ross Kenyon: Have you ever found that in speaking with some of these communities, like if you’re, if you’re working with people who work in fisheries, that it’s, it’s more than a job to them. It’s not interchangeable with some, if there was like a green jobs, a retraining program, their family might be in fishing for a long time. And I think asking them to give it up, like where does the, um, like social justice angle, climate justice angle, how does it maybe interact with the problem like that?
Judy Twedt: Mm-hmm. Social justice is so connected to climate change because it does have these massive human impacts that really... Different impacts on communities depending on their level of resiliency and all sorts of things. To speak specifically about fishermen and fisherwomen, I was actually in conversation yesterday with an Alaska native. I’m doing a new collection of pieces building off of what we just listened to of Arctic pieces, but some of them will incorporate stories of human experience of climate change from people who live and work in the Arctic. And So Haley Hannah Stepton is one person who I met through University of Washington, but she now lives in Anchorage and she and her family are fishermen.
And she was talking about how great her concerns are about food security. And it’s not just from changes in fishing. And fish supplies. It’s also from summertime berry harvesting that they’re seeing massive changes in local berries and they think it’s related to warming winters there. So that’s an area where economic security and food security are really intertwined. So, you know, you look around at different populations and the way that people are impacted is, you know, varies quite a bit. Here in King County, there’s a coalition front and center that works to represent communities of color and they know that there’s much higher asthma rates around highway corridors, right, where there’s a lot more particulate emissions.
So these are different concerns from communities that need to be considered and addressed when we’re thinking about the problems.
Ross Kenyon: Well, it sounds like your head and your heart are in the right place there. If you’re making music about the Arctic, you should see if you can get Sufjan Stevens in on making an Alaska album. Oh, man.
Judy Twedt: That’d be incredible.
Ross Kenyon: When’s that coming? He stopped making the state albums, but maybe it’s time to... We’re coming for you, Sufjan Stevens. That’s never going to happen, but we would like that. Well, great. I guess if someone wanted to find more of your music and learn more, is it at your website? Is that the best place to do so? You also have a great TEDx talk that we’ve seen.
Judy Twedt: Yeah, I post a lot of my pieces up on my website, judytweet.com. People can go there to find samples of it.
Ross Kenyon: And that’s T-W-E-D-T. Well, thanks for being here with us. Thanks for being a totally new angle. It’s nice to meet people who are creative because we talk to a lot of nerds. Too many nerds. It’s a lot of scientists, policy people.
Christophe Jospe: I would say Judy is a nerd too. She fits the bill. You strike us as a nerd too.
Judy Twedt: I work really hard not to use a lot of jargon though.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and successfully it appears too. Well, thanks for being here, being something new. We’re hoping that we can do more things like this in the future. And thank you. And if you like the show, you’re looking at me to chastise me, but you didn’t even know that I was going to do it. If you like the show, please subscribe, give us a good rating, tell your friends. And thanks for being a fan of Reversing Climate Change.
Judy Twedt: Thanks so much for having me.
