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

by Jeff Goodell

Pictures of hungry polar bears, trying to survive on rapidly melting ice, are among the most familiar and gut-wrenching images of our rapidly warming world. In 2018, a video of a starving polar bear on Baffin Island went viral, viewed more than two million times by people all over the world, eliciting outrage and sympathy. Paul Nicklen, the National Geographic photographer who shot the video, told the New York Times that the image of the staggering, skeleton-thin bear “rips the heart out of your chest.” Some scientists and climate activists balked at the attention the polar bear video received, warning that emotional reactions are fleeting, and that it is the human impact of climate change that we should be focusing on, not suffering bears. But other scientists understood that telling stories about what’s happening to polar bears is a useful bridge to helping people understand what’s happening to human beings.