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

by Jeff Goodell

In the mountains and valleys, every plant and tree was assaulted by the heat, rooted in place and unable to move, creators of shade that were themselves unable to seek refuge. As the temperature rose, they struggled with the heat just as humans do, trying to preserve water while the sun and the heat sucked it out of the soil and the flesh of their leaves and trunks. All across the Pacific Northwest there was a great clenching as the plants closed the pores on the undersides of their leaves, in effect holding their breath, hoping the heat would pass quickly. Blackberry and blueberry plants drank the moisture out of their own fruit, leaving it dry and withered on the stalk. On broadleaf trees like ash and maple, leaves brittled and curled. As temperatures rose, some of the most sun-exposed trees opened their pores, desperately trying to cool off by sweating. Their roots worked to pull water out of the dry soil, but instead sucked air bubbles into the veins that ran up their trunks, causing them to rupture. If you’d had the right kind of microphone, scientists say, you could have heard the trees screaming.

In a heat wave, wealth can afford twenty-five degrees of coolness.

In this sense, a heat wave is a predatory event, one that culls out the most vulnerable people. But that will change. As heat waves become more intense and more common, they will become more democratic.

If there is one idea in this book that might save your life, it is this: The human body, like all living things, is a heat machine. Just being alive generates heat. But if your body gets too hot too fast—it doesn’t matter if that heat comes from the outside on a hot day or the inside from a raging fever—you are in big trouble.

As cities grow and the heat rises, the future of Phoenix and Chennai, and many cities like them, is of a kind of temperature apartheid, where some people chill in a bubble of cool and others simmer in debilitating heat. This is not how you build a just, equitable, or peaceful world.

How to explain this? Denial and ignorance are one answer, especially among politicians whose job it is to create policy that discourages people from moving into harm’s way. As the US Government Accountability Office concluded in a 2020 report, “Unclear federal leadership is the key challenge to climate migration as a resilience strategy.”

The simple truth is that in the second half of the twentieth century, prosperous Americans got hooked on comfort, with little thought about the cost of that comfort to others, to the welfare of other species, or to the world around them. That addiction has now spread to millions of people around the world, who find they too cannot live without cheap cold air.

Trees are our deep-time evolutionary companions, fellow living things that we have spent millions of years leaning against, climbing, and worshipping.

“We need a social and cultural transformation on a level that I’m afraid people who have been in power for the last twenty years cannot really imagine.”

When it comes to imagining the future at the edge of the Goldilocks Zone, it’s this thermal gap that is hardest to see. If the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated anything, it was how quickly and easily people were able to normalize the deaths of others, especially if they were old, sick, or otherwise living on the margins. There were a thousand deaths a day from Covid in the US alone. There were headlines and speeches and heroic doctors and nurses. And if you lost a friend or loved one, you felt the tragedy of it all. But after the initial shock and fear of Covid, the deaths became a part of everyday life. Just as the 43,000 deaths a year in the US in auto accidents no longer trigger public outcry. Or the nine million deaths globally from air pollution each year. Or starvation in Yemen and Haiti. Or casualties of distant wars. It just becomes part of the world we live in. And so it may be, I fear, with the suffering and deaths from extreme heat. It will become part of what it means to live in the twenty-first century, something we accept and don’t think too much about in our everyday lives. But the hotter it gets, the more difficult that will become.