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

by Jeff Goodell

In Alaska, hunters are discovering parasites from a thousand miles away in southeast Canada alive under the skin of wild birds. “A wild exodus has begun,” writes Sonia Shah in The Next Great Migration. “It is happening on every continent and in every ocean.” During this wild exodus, these migrating animals are likely to bump into new animals and humans they have never crossed paths with before. Carlson, the Georgetown biologist, calls these events “meet cutes”—random encounters where viruses jump species and new diseases are often born. The vast majority of the new infectious diseases that have emerged in recent decades have come from these zoonotic pathogens, as they are called, with bats, mosquitoes, and ticks being among the most competent carriers of new viruses. When they jump to humans, we get pandemics like Covid-19. What’s next? “It’s really a roll of the dice,” says Raina Plowright, an epidemiologist at Montana State University who studies the emergence of new diseases.