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

by Jeff Goodell

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.

For pine bark beetles, an invasive species that is decimating western forests, the heat was like guzzling Red Bull.

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

As with most heat waves today, the people who died first were elderly folks who lived alone, or who were too poor to afford air-conditioning, or who had a medical problem that left them vulnerable. 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.

In a world of heat-driven chaos, heat exposes deep fissures of inequity and injustice. Poverty equals vulnerability.

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.

Muir described death as a “home-going”: “Myriads of rejoicing living creatures, daily, hourly, perhaps every moment sink into death’s arms,” Richard read. “Yet all enjoy life as we do, share Heaven’s blessings with us, die and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity.”

Humans became excellent hot-weather hunters. They could venture out in the heat of the day when other animals couldn’t, giving them a predatory advantage. By the time Homo erectus appeared about two million years ago, our ancestors were on their way to becoming endurance athletes, with long legs, nimble feet, and strong leg and hip muscles. With their superior heat management systems, they could literally run down an animal until it has heatstroke. This practice continues today. In the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, modern hunter-gatherers are able to kill a kudu, a kind of antelope that is far faster than humans over short distances, by chasing it for hours in the middle of the hot day, until it literally collapses of heat exhaustion.

But the heat management strategies of humans, like those of all living things, have been optimized for the Goldilocks Zone we have been living in for the last ten thousand years or so. They are a holdover from a world that is changing fast—far too fast for evolutionary selection to keep up.

When it comes to heat management, we are like actors in Hollywood’s silent era who suddenly find themselves cast in speaking roles. We know the script, but our skills are no longer well-matched for the world we live in.

(Ironically, new, highly efficient LEED-certified buildings are tightly sealed, making them dangerous heat traps when the power goes out.)

In Phoenix, temperature is a signifier of class, wealth, and, often, race. If you’re rich, you have a big house with enough air-conditioning to chill a martini.

As temperatures soar in the coming years, the real question is not whether superheated cities are sustainable. Phoenix is not going to melt into the desert and Chennai will not return to the jungle. The question is, sustainable for who? And at what cost? 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.

Novelist John Steinbeck called Route 66 the “Mother Road”—it was the route that hundreds of thousands of people took to escape from America’s first man-made environmental catastrophe.

heat is rising faster than our ability to adapt to it.

“Should the flight away from hot climates reach the scale that current research suggests is likely,” writes journalist Abrahm Lustgarten, “it will amount to a vast remapping of the world’s populations.”

The political consequences of these massive shifts of people are impossible to overstate. Here in the US, unfounded fears of brown people invading the country and stealing jobs and committing crimes are disguised as a policy debate about immigration. Fear of outsiders also fuels the rise of extreme right-wing politics in Europe and Australia. (“If you want to understand Australian politics,” one Australian entrepreneur told me during my visit to Melbourne, “the first thing you have to understand is our fear of yellow hordes from the north.”) Migration is driven by many factors, but a lack of food and water, both of which are exacerbated by extreme heat, is pretty high on the list.

“Unclear federal leadership is the key challenge to climate migration as a resilience strategy.”

Over coffee, Orlowski explained how the border police use helicopters to patrol the most remote parts of the borderlands. If they spot a group of migrants, they use a technique called dusting, in which they lower the helicopter down to thirty or forty feet above the migrants, kicking up a huge dust storm and scattering the migrants. “When they are alone, they are much more vulnerable,” Orlowski said. It is a brutal technique. Many of the people who die have gotten separated from their families and travel companions and end up wandering alone in the desert. In the last three decades, No More Deaths estimates that more than nine thousand people have died here on the Devil’s Highway, virtually all of them from dehydration and heat exhaustion.

Orlowski pointed out that there are lots of Border Patrol agents in places where it is easy to cross. And far, far fewer in places where it is hot and dangerous to cross. “Part of their strategy is to funnel migrants through the hottest, most dangerous regions of the border,” Orlowski explained.

To Otto, who spent most of her waking life thinking about the causes and consequences of extreme weather events, living through a heat wave was like being trapped in her own imagination. It was both familiar and surreal.

It surprised her. And her surprise surprised her.

Otto and her colleagues have proven that almost all extreme heat waves we are experiencing today are not the standard effects of Mother Nature, or, as climate skeptics like to say, “just the weather.” They are caused by the actions of human beings and the choices they make.

She pedaled on through the city. She was surprised to see how many people had their windows open—which, Otto knew, might seem logical but is exactly the wrong thing to do when you don’t have air-conditioning (in the city, especially if there are no cooling winds, it’s better to close the windows and draw the curtains early in the day to keep out both the sun and the heat).

As Otto biked along, she knew people were dying in the heat at that very moment.

“Even small changes in [average] temperatures sometimes result in large changes in event probabilities,” they wrote.

In an article he wrote as the floodwaters inched closer to his kitchen door, Allen argued that it might not always be impossible to attribute extreme weather events to climate change—it was just “simply impossible at present, given our current state of understanding of the climate system.” And if researchers were ever able to make that breakthrough, he mused, the science could potentially influence the public’s ability to blame greenhouse gas emitters for the damages caused by climate-related events. Allen’s commentary was published in February 2003 in the prestigious journal Nature with the stark but scary (for fossil fuel companies) title “Liability for Climate Change.”

The science of extreme event attribution, Otto quickly realized, could have a profound effect on how people viewed the impacts of human-made climate change—and whom they held responsible for it. “To me, science is—or can be—a tool for justice,” she told me.

“I think a lot of the old white guys in the science world just dismissed me as a crazy woman off doing something on her own, and paid no attention to me.”

“By attacking Ukraine, the breadbasket of the world, Putin is attacking the world’s poor, spiking global hunger when people are already on the brink of famine,” Samantha Power, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), told reporters.

This war-driven food crisis, however, was in some sense artificial, given that it was not driven by any actual shortage of food in the world. Even with the Ukrainian wheat off the market, there was still plenty of grain to go around. The issue was how much it cost and how it was distributed. And Putin was not the only one who was exploiting this situation. Commodity traders make money off wild price swings, shippers make money off people desperate for grain, fertilizer manufacturers make money off farmers desperate to maximize their yields, and protofascist politicians are happy to exploit rising food prices as evidence of the failure of democracy.

“The largest single global change that threatens food security is high temperature.”

In the summertime, a single acre of corn in Iowa can sweat four thousand gallons a day—enough to fill a typical residential swimming pool in less than a week. This need for water is why, for crops like corn and soybeans, dry heat is much more damaging than wet heat—dry heat not only sucks the moisture out of the plants, but it is usually accompanied by lower rainfall, which dries out the soil that allows the crops to thrive.

Of all the commercial food crops, corn may be the most vulnerable to heat.

Like aloe and other succulents, corn evolved in a warm place. Its wild ancestor, a grass called teosinte, thrived for ten thousand years in the Balsas River Valley in south-central Mexico, where the temperature is a steady 80 degrees. That means that deep in its ancestral gene pool, it has more tools to handle heat than many plants. But 80 degrees is very different than, say, 102 degrees. As the world heats up, corn is nearing the limits of its adaptive (or “permissive”) temperature range. To put it another way, it’s already growing in hot places and now those places are getting hotter. Add a modest heat wave to those already hot places and corn has trouble coping. Add an extreme heat wave and it may not recover at all. Corn is in particular trouble if that heat wave hits during the reproductive cycle. “Heat disrupts the development of the pollen tube, which is deployed from the pollen to deliver the sperm into the female plant’s ovule,” plant scientist Donald Ort told me. “So the plant never fertilizes, there is no ear.” Corn is also vulnerable because, at least here in the US, big seed companies like Monsanto and BSF have had their way with the corn genome for years. Growing it requires huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizers, which end up polluting rivers and lakes, causing huge algae blooms. In the right conditions, commercially bred corn is a superstar. But if heat spikes and rains don’t come at the right time, it’s vulnerable. In the highly engineered varieties of corn ...

The vulnerability of corn matters because it’s the industrial food stock of American life. Processed foods, from breakfast cereals to ice cream, are saturated in corn syrup. Corn is also a prime feedstock for animals, which have themselves been engineered to ingest and digest huge amounts of corn and transform it into animal protein. In this sense, a McDonald’s hamburger is better thought of as a McDonald’s corn burger. Corn fuels your trip to McDonald’s, too. More than half the corn grown in Iowa actually ends up as ethanol, which is mixed with gasoline and is an essential ingredient in fuel.

Replacing feedlots with cricket farms and lab-grown proteins has lots of co-benefits too. They would not only reduce the animal suffering associated with slaughterhouses, they would also free up vast amounts of land for wildlife and forests.

Nick Bond, a climatologist at the University of Washington, nicknamed the Pacific heat wave the Blob, after a campy 1958 sci-fi movie about a gelatinous monster that arrives on Earth in a meteor and eats up a small town. But this Blob would turn out to be far more deadly than anything Hollywood had imagined.

Largely because of overfishing, 90 percent of the large fish that were here in the 1950s are now gone. One metric ton of plastic enters the ocean every four seconds (at this rate, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050).

“If a two-hundred-mile-long stretch of forest in the California mountains suddenly died, people would be shocked and outraged,” Laura Rogers-Bennett, a marine scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, told me when I visited her at the Bodega Marine Lab a few days after our dive. “We’re talking about the collapse of an entire ecosystem. But because it happened in the ocean, nobody notices.”

(officials in Qatar were in no hurry to launch an investigation into migrant worker deaths).

In 2021, the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act was introduced in the US House of Representatives. The main purpose of the legislation, named after a California farmworker who died of heatstroke in 2004 after picking grapes for ten straight hours on a 105-degree day, is to finally require OSHA to develop heat rules. As I write this in early 2023, the chances that the legislation will make it to the House floor for a vote anytime soon are virtually zero.

(virtually all undocumented workers pay taxes, even though few ever claim Social Security or Medicare benefits later).

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, heat and racism were deeply entwined. The belief that some races (i.e., nonwhite) are better suited to heat than others (i.e., whites) was widely held, especially in the antebellum South. It helped provide a moral justification for slavery and allowed slaveowners to ignore the horrific working conditions that slaves were subjected to in the cotton fields.

“The labor requiring exposure to a mid-day’s summer sun, from the laws of the white man’s nature, cannot be performed in the cotton and sugar region without exposing him to disease and death; yet the same kind of labor experience proves to be only a wholesome and beneficial exercise to the negro.”

“The skull of the negro is very thick, dense and strong, resisting injuries and the effect of the heat to a wonderful degree.” Holcombe concluded that racial peculiarities “prove the negro to be organically constituted to be an agricultural laborer in tropical climates—a strong animal machine.”

“[The negro’s] head is protected from the rays of a vertical sun by a dense mat of woolly hair, wholly impervious to its fiercest heats, while his entire surface, studded with innumerable sebaceous glands, forming a complete excretory system, relieves him from all those climatic influences so fatal, under the same circumstances, to the sensitive and highly organized white man. Instead of seeking to shelter himself from the burning sun of the tropics, he courts it, enjoys it, delights in its fiercest heats.”

“God has adapted him, both in his physical and mental structu...

Even after slavery was abolished and scientific racism was exposed as a manifestation of white privilege and stupidity, the idea that some races were be...

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