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

by Jeff Goodell

If you’d had the right kind of microphone, scientists say, you could have heard the trees screaming.

In Lents, one of Portland’s poorest neighborhoods, where trees are few and concrete is plentiful, Shandas measured an air temperature of 124 degrees, the highest temperature he had ever recorded in fifteen years of chronicling heat. “When I stopped and opened my car door, the first thing I felt was my eyes burning,” Shandas recalled. “My skin was on fire. It just feels like you’re melting.” He drove to Willamette Heights, a tree-lined suburb with parks and lots of greenery where the median house price is about $1 million. He measured the air temperature again: 99 degrees. In a heat wave, wealth can afford twenty-five degrees of coolness.

But as June came and went and summer turned to fall, life went back to normal, and the memory of the heat wave faded, as memories of heat waves always do, until they become like the fleeting images of a nightmare you’re not quite sure you had. Or a future you don’t want to imagine.

So far, thanks to 250 years of hell-bent fuel consumption, which has filled the atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2), global temperatures have risen by 2.2 degrees since the preindustrial era and are on track to warm by 6 degrees or more by the end of the century. The more oil, gas, and coal we burn, the hotter it will get.

Right now we’re more than halfway to 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) of warming from preindustrial temperatures, which scientists have long warned is the threshold for dangerous climate change. The reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are full of harrowing details of what might happen to our world with 3.6 degrees of warming, from collapsing ice sheets to crop-killing drought. But to nonscientists—which is to say, most humans on the planet—3.6 degrees of warming does not sound dangerous at all. Who can tell the difference between a 77-degree day and an 81-degree day?

In this sense, extreme heat is an entirely human artifact, a legacy of human civilization as real as the Great Wall of China.

Until we figure out a way to suck massive amounts of CO2 out of the sky, we will be stuck with a hotter planet.

When the next pandemic hits, the chances are good it will be caused by a pathogen that leapt from an animal that was seeking out a cooler place to live.

As one architect told me, “If you have enough money, you can engineer your way out of anything.” And in some ways, he’s right.

In a world of heat-driven chaos, heat exposes deep fissures of inequity and injustice. Poverty equals vulnerability. If you have money, you can turn up the air-conditioning, stock up on food and bottled water, and install a backup generator in case there’s a blackout. If things get bad enough, you can sell your house and move to a cooler place. If you’re poor, on the other hand, you swelter in an uninsulated apartment or trailer with no air-conditioning or an old, inefficient machine that you can’t afford to run. You can’t move somewhere cooler because you’re afraid of losing your job and you don’t have the savings to start over.

“We’re all in the storm, but we’re not in the same boat,” Heather McTeer Toney, the former mayor of Greenville, Mississippi, said during testimony before the US Congress. “Some of us are sitting on aircraft carriers while others are just bobbing along on a floatie.”

The toll is enormous: globally, between 260,000 and 600,000 people die each year inhaling smoke from wildfires. Smoke pollution doesn’t only kill people near fires either. Wildfires in western Canada have been directly linked to spikes in hospitalizations three thousand miles away on the East Coast of the US.

Since 1970, the Earth’s temperature has spiked faster than in any comparable forty-year period in recorded history. The eight years between 2015 and 2022 were the hottest on record.

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.

There is a lot of confusion about the relationship between water and heat exhaustion and heatstroke. Water is necessary to keep sweat flowing. If you get dehydrated, you can’t sweat. And if you can’t sweat, you can’t cool off. But drinking water does not in itself cool off inner-core body temperatures. Put another way, dehydration can exacerbate heat exhaustion and heatstroke, but you can still die of heatstroke and be well hydrated.

“Both heat exhaustion and heatstroke can occur in the absence of dehydration. We can speculate that proper hydration can, however, delay heat exhaustion because dehydration exacerbates heat exhaustion. But proper hydration cannot prevent heatstroke.”

A well-hydrated human can sweat up to three quarts per hour, but no matter how much water you drink, your body can only replace about two quarts of water per hour—so if you are in a hot place for a long time, dehydration is a concern.

The only effective treatment for heatstroke is to get a person’s core body temperature down, fast. A cold shower or bath, or tubs (or, as I mentioned in the prologue, body bags) of ice, is one way to do this. Another is to quickly cool places on the body where, because of the structure of our veins, a lot of blood circulates close to the surface: the bottoms of the feet, the palms of the hands, the upper part of the face.

Exactly how long it takes to acclimatize to a hotter climate depends on a variety of factors, including how much you exercise in the heat and your physical condition. Two weeks is average for most people. Interestingly, exposure to air-conditioning even for brief periods slows or even stops acclimatization.

Despite the fact that cities are full of people, urban heat has the perverse effect of creating islands of isolation and hardship for anyone without the means or the social connections to access cool spaces. It makes the hardship of poverty harder and turns even the simplest tasks of daily life into risky adventures.

But then the great urbanization of India began in the 1970s. Unlike Delhi and other cities, which went vertical, Chennai spread horizontally. Wetlands and swamps were covered over. The arrival of air-conditioning meant that when they built things now, developers and city officials didn’t bother to think about sea breezes or airflow. Traditional wells were replaced with deep-bore wells, which were dependent on the region’s deep aquifer, which, among other things, was prone to saltwater intrusions that made it undrinkable.

As one journalist wrote, “The ancient south Indian port has become a case study in what can go wrong when industrialization, urbanization and extreme weather converge and a booming metropolis paves over its flood plain to satisfy demand for new homes, factories and offices.”

For humans, the decision to stay or go from extremely hot places is often dependent on money, which buys access to cooling systems, clean water, and food. But most living things don’t have the luxury of conditioned air or ordering a case of Pellegrino from Whole Foods. For them, adaptation often means moving to higher latitudes or higher elevations where it is cooler. If they can’t find refuge, they die.

In many places in the world today, heat is rising faster than our ability to adapt to it.

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.

“Part of their strategy is to funnel migrants through the hottest, most dangerous regions of the border,” Orlowski explained. “So, basically, the US Border Patrol has figured out a way to weaponize heat,” I said. “Yes, that’s one way to think about it,” he replied.

Nobody expected a 70-degree jump in temperature during a heat wave in Antarctica in 2021. And yet it happened. Nobody expected 121 degrees in British Columbia. And yet it happened. Nobody expected 104 degrees in London. And yet it happened. As of 2022, the current record high in Phoenix is 122 degrees. Could it hit 135 degrees? How about 140 degrees? If not in Phoenix, how about in Pakistan? What are the limits?

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

“Whenever we tried to get growers to pay attention to the risks of heat in workers, they always talked about how they couldn’t afford it,” one Oregon organizer told me. “They said prices are set by retail buyers, and changes in labor costs would make them uncompetitive—which is, of course, complete bullshit.”

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.

“It doesn’t take cutting-edge technologies, or expensive machinery. It takes shade and cool water and rest. That is all. The way that this industry has disrespected and refused to provide this to workers is just criminal.”

If all of Greenland were to melt, that’s twenty-two feet of sea-level rise. When Antarctica goes, it’s two hundred feet.

Vibrio vulnificus, if you happen to eat it in raw or undercooked shellfish, might give you a bad stomachache (in rare cases, it can be fatal). If the bacteria gets in a cut or wound, however, it becomes a flesh-eating horror and kills one in five people who come in contact with it.

An estimated 40,000 viruses lurk in the bodies of mammals, of which a quarter could infect humans.

Some tick species are moving as much as thirty miles north each year—an unseen parade of bloodsuckers conquering new terrain.

Air-conditioning enabled the building boom not only in Texas, but throughout the South. Goodbye big porches and flow-through ventilation. Hello mass-produced suburban development with cheap construction, low ceilings, and zero airflow.

In Texas, it was mostly middle-class white folks who benefited from air-conditioning. By 1960, 30 percent of homes in Texas were air-conditioned, the highest in the country. But only 10 percent of the state’s Black population had it.

The political ramifications of this demographic shift to the Sun Belt was enormous. The flood of conservative retirees to the South, once a Democratic stronghold, shifted the balance of power in American politics. Between 1940 and 1980, warm-climate states in the South gained twenty-nine electoral college votes, while the colder states of the Northeast and the Rust Belt lost thirty-one. Among the first to figure this out was Richard Nixon, who wooed these Sun Belt conservatives in the 1960s with anti–civil rights messages and racial dog whistles. American politics has never been the same since.

It’s a vicious cycle. And it is even more vicious in cities, especially in older and poorer neighborhoods, where old, inefficient window air conditioners hang out of every building, sucking heat out of the interior but blowing it out into the street. In this sense, air-conditioning is not a cooling technology at all—it’s simply a tool for heat redistribution.

The quest for comfort at all costs—or to be more precise, the sense that comfort is an inalienable right of modern life—is wreaking havoc on our world.

In the end, the most enduring legacy of air-conditioning may be the divide it has created between the cool and the damned. And the hotter it gets, the bigger that gap will grow. This is not a technological failure as much as it is a cultural and psychological issue.

A warming Arctic is also speeding up the melting of permafrost, releasing vast quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas that is twenty-five times more potent than CO2. More methane means more warming, which will release still more methane—when scientists talk about a looming climate catastrophe, this is one of the scenarios that worries them most.

it’s not just methane and woolly mammoth bones that are locked up in the Arctic permafrost—there are also viruses and pathogens from an earlier time, which, as I mentioned in a previous chapter, when thawed and released into our world, could unleash a global pandemic

The best way to stop heating up the planet is to stop burning fossil fuels and dumping more and more CO2 into the atmosphere. As soon as that happens, the Earth’s temperature will stop rising. Then, over the decades and centuries after that, as long as future humans don’t go back to burning fossil fuels and dumping more CO2 into the atmosphere, the Earth’s temperature will slowly decline.

“Humanity retains an enormous amount of control over just how hot it will get and how much we will do to protect one another through [the coming] assaults and disruptions,” argues David Wallace-Wells,

The good news, Wallace-Wells points out, is that the world is decarbonizing faster than anyone anticipated a decade ago. And thanks to decades of innovation, clean energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel energy in most parts of the world. That means we now have the means to lift hundreds of millions of people out of energy poverty without relying on coal, gas, or oil.

The Permian lasted about 50 million years. Then, suddenly, over a period of maybe sixty thousand years—the blink of an eye in geologic time—everything died. Or nearly everything died. What killed life in the Permian was a bolt of extreme heat, brought on by violent eruptions of volcanoes in Siberia, which dumped billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere very quickly, causing the Earth’s temperature to jump as much as 26 degrees and triggering 140 degree heat waves on the land. In the tropics, the ocean warmed to 104 degrees, which is about the temperature of water in a Jacuzzi. Enough lava erupted from these traps to cover the entire United States in molten rock a half mile deep. It would take life on Earth ten million years to recover. The End-Permian extinction was a horrific event, beyond our capacity to imagine. It was mass death by heatstroke. We think we’re a long way from re-creating Guadalupe Mountains here in the twenty-first century. But we are not.

“Right now, in the amazing moment that counts to us as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open to us and which will be forever closed,” Elizabeth Kolbert writes in The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. “No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.”

For me, the big surprise in writing this book has been discovering not only how easily and quickly heat can kill you, but what a powerful reminder it is of how deeply connected we are to one another and to all living things.

And finally to Simone—my muse, my first and best reader, my fellow traveler, my monster-wrangler. You are, and always will be, hot.