Author: Bethany Brookshire / Source: Science News for Students
Climate change can be a tough topic to face. Permafrost is thawing, sea levels are rising and glaciers are melting.
But in our day-to-day lives, those changes can be hard to see. Most of us don’t live near glaciers or beaches. Most of us won’t build a house on permafrost. How do we grasp the problem? Maybe we need art.From epic operas to video games to city-spanning painted projects, here are seven artists, scientists and composers who are using art to spread the word about our changing climate.
Gaming the changing climate
Climate change is “one of these topics that makes people want to turn off and disengage,” says Dargan Frierson. “It shouldn’t be that way.” Frierson is a climate scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. He created a game called Climate Quest to help players engage with climate change. Why a game? “There are so many things that games can do,” he says, that help people connect to big problems like climate change. “You can speed up time, visualize things that are invisible or … fail a few times before you’re eventually successful.”
In the game, disasters strike all over the United States. Players are given a roster of experts such as urban planners and climate scientists. Send the right expert out, solve the problem and save the day. Frierson and three colleagues pulled the simple game together in a single weekend at a hackathon — an event where people work together to build solutions to problems. “A lot of educational games are not very good because they’re a little bit boring,” he says. “It’s most important to make it fun first.”
This is what climate change sounds like
Scientists often state that the planet has warmed by 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1850. But the weather from year to year varies. It’s hard to grasp just what one degree of overall warming is like.
That’s why Daniel Crawford picked up his cello.
Crawford studies climate at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul. When he was a college student, he worked with Scott St. George, a scientist who studies climate by looking at ancient tree rings. “He had been interested in using music to convey trends in climate change data,” Crawford says.
Crawford and St. George started with a dataset of surface temperatures beginning in 1880. By matching each yearly temperature change with a musical note, Crawford composed a “song for our warming planet.” As the temperature gets warmer, the notes get higher. The result is a creepy tune. “The maps, the graphs and the numbers are not conveying the message,” Crawford says. He and St. George hope that music might make a difference.
Climate change dresses up
Artist Michele Banks frequently uses science in her work. “I use science as a way to approach ideas about life in general,” she says. “I find it really fascinating … it helps us get closer to answers about big questions.” Banks is based in Washington, D.C., and usually paints with watercolor.
But when she decided to create a piece…
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