The Climate ‘Hot 10 Songs’

At its best, music can act as a kind of auditory restorative, lifting us up when we're down. It can help hold us together, both as individuals and collectively, when a trauma sends ripples across society.

Twenty-five years ago, after the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, “Lightning Crashes” by the rock band Live seemed to put a voice to the nation’s pain. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the music of bounce artist 5th Ward Webbie crystallized the feeling, common among many New Orleanians, that their government had abandoned them.

Yet in recent decades, even as climate change caused temperatures to soar and triggered lethal hurricanes, catastrophic fires and cataclysmic floods across the United States and its territories, a keen ear could hear the theme of global warming starting to swell, from country to rap, rock to pop.

A look at lyrics from all artists who have appeared on any of Billboard’s domestic charts in the past two decades revealed at least 192 references to climate change. And like climate change, those references are accelerating. Two-thirds came in the last decade, which was also the hottest decade on record, with 26 of the songs released last year.

Take a look at, and listen to, some of the highlights, beginning in 1999 when a California power-pop band called Smash Mouth warned us that the ice was getting pretty thin.

This year we asked people on Twitter for their favorite songs by popular artists that are related to climate change. Several songs — Midnight Oil’s “Beds Are Burning,” Sarah McLachlan’s “World on Fire” and Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” — came up that aren’t about climate change. Smash Mouth’s “All Star” was mentioned repeatedly and has the distinction of actually being about climate change. (The others are about the forced removal of Australian Aboriginal people, the 9/11 attacks and hooking up at the club.)

“I’m no scientist, I’m just the guy that writes songs and plays guitar,” Smash Mouth’s Mr. Camp said. He said he felt that musicians and other artists that have a podium needed to at least mention climate change “to try and get people to be a part of the problem-solving as opposed to part of the problem.”

“All Star” isn’t the first time the band tackled climate change: “Walkin’ on the Sun,” released two years earlier, also touched on the subject. But “All Star” endures in part because the band authorized its use “to every single thing,” Mr. Camp said. Its inclusion in “Shrek,” for example, brings the song and its ideas to new generations.

And Mr. Camp and his bandmates broached climate change at a time when most popular musicians were not doing so. A search of Billboard charts at the time of “All Star’s” release in 1999 turned up only two other popular artists who referenced the issue in their music. The band Testament released “Fall of Sipledome” and the rapper Mos Def came out with “New World Water.”

This list is based on an analysis of thousands of song lyrics, provided by the lyric hub Genius, that looked for climate change references between 1999 and 2019, the last year for which full data is available. It focused on songs that were primarily in English and released in the United States by popular artists.

As a measure of popularity, any artist who ever appeared on any of Billboard’s domestic charts was included. In total we found 192 references to climate change, which is likely a minimum. (Repeat references on the same album were not counted.) Just under half of those references, or 87 songs, came in the five-year period between 2015 and 2019. In comparison, the previous decade, 1999 to 2009, included 61 songs.

The increase in musical references is in line with trends that Anthony Leiserowitz, a human geographer and the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, has documented more broadly. Since 2008, he has been conducting regular surveys of people’s attitudes toward climate change across the United States. “In the past five years there’s really been an upsurge in public engagement with the issue,” he said.

“My mother was the one that taught me about global warming and climate change and the greenhouse effect,” said Pitbull, whose given name is Armando Christian Pérez.

Pitbull, who served as a United Nations ambassador for its Clean Water Here initiative in 2018, not only named his 2012 album “Global Warming,” he called his 2017 album “Climate Change.”

“The reason that it’s something so important to me and I’ve named albums behind it and I put it in records is because if we don’t have a world, we don’t have anything” he said.

Since his mother first taught him about climate change in the early 1990s, Mr. Pérez said he read up on the topic and watched rigorously researched documentary films to deepen his understanding. Dr. Leiserowitz said that films, even fictional ones, can have a strong influence on people's views.

Dr. Leiserowitz once researched the effect that watching the 2004 disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow” had on viewers. The film takes broad liberties with both science and reality, yet Dr. Leiserowitz found that film watchers became more engaged with the subject and learned “some important new ideas about climate science and climate change.”

Pitbull also weaves climate change themes into unexpected places.

“I felt if I made a record about global warming nobody was going to jam through it,” he said. “But if I make albums named global warming, climate change, globalization, people will start to connect the dots as I sprinkle it in records that they may dance to.”

He points to the fact that in Miami, his hometown, you can already see that the seas are rising as his impetus for trying to increase awareness. And he hopes that when we emerge from the coronavirus disaster, which he’s already chronicled in his recent single “I Believe That We Will Win,” we’ll emerge with an awareness of the need to deal with planet-scale issues as a global community.

As the second decade of the 21st century drew to an end, climate change and popular music became increasingly intertwined. Last summer, a group called Music Declares Emergency formed, with artists like Massive Attack and DJ Spooky calling on governments to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by no later than 2030. The group’s tagline: “No music on a dead planet.”

And music itself has seemingly changed with our changing climate, with the language of climate change — words like ice cap and glacier — becoming more common even in songs that were not about climate change, like Nicki Minaj’s “Feeling Myself.” (Glacier, in that song’s context, refers to a large diamond.)

Last year Little Nas X tweeted that when he said “i got the horses in the back,” a line in his hit song “Old Town Road,” “it was in reference to reversing the ongoing climate change, water pollution, and catastrophic political climate we are witnessing in these trying times.”

And shortly after Megan Thee Stallion declared 2019 to be “Hot Girl Summer,” the Houston rapper took to Instagram to make it clear that the so-called hot girl lifestyle includes protecting the environment, eventually hosting what she called the first-ever Hottie Beach Clean Up in Malibu, Calif.

Twenty years later, what does Smash Mouth’s Mr. Camp think about this trend? Noting that more people are aware of climate change now, he said, “It would be a bonus if I had some part in that.”

“I’m hoping that the generation that's writing songs now will speak to their generation,” he said, “because it may be the last generation that can actually stop this tipping point.”