The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

by Jeff Goodell

“If you have enough money, you can engineer your way out of anything.”

The only place we still have significant hair is on our heads, and that’s because our brains are so sensitive to heat, and in this situation, hair works as a sunshade to help keep our brains cool.

Hurricanes are heat engines, powered by warm, moist air rising over warm oceans (that’s why there are no hurricanes in the Arctic).

What’s at stake here is not just architecture. It’s our history, our culture, and our identity. But given the acceleration and urgency of the climate crisis, the harsh truth is, not everything can be saved.

Trees are superheroes of the climate fight. They inhale CO2 and exhale oxygen, filtering out air pollution with each breath. They suck up water from the ground and sweat it out through their leaves, which cools the air (think of them as mini–air conditioners). And of course they provide shade to all creatures great and small, as well as to the soil around them, which helps to reduce water loss through evaporation. As anyone who has taken a walk through a city park knows, they also offer mental health benefits to stressed-out urbanites. Trees are our deep-time evolutionary companions, fellow living things that we have spent millions of years leaning against, climbing, and worshipping.

One of the most beautiful and historic trees in Austin, a six-hundred-year-old oak known as the Treaty Oak because it is where city founder Stephen F. Austin supposedly met local Native Americans to negotiate and sign Texas’s first boundary treaty, was poisoned in 1989 by a guy who read some witchcraft books and thought killing the tree would somehow end his sorrow over being rejected by a woman (the tree was badly damaged but it’s still alive).

Pytheas called the place he encountered Thule, as in ultima Thule—the land beyond all known lands. That is one of several names the Greeks gave us for the Far North. Another is Arctic, from Arktikos—“of the great bear.” The reference was not to polar bears, which were unknown in Europe until the eleventh century, but to Ursa Major, the most prominent circumpolar constellation in the northern skies.