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

by Jeff Goodell

In the summer of 2021, weathercasters in the Pacific Northwest warned people that a heat wave was on the way. Workers in Washington’s Yakima Valley were summoned to cherry orchards at 1 a.m. so the ripe fruit could be picked before it turned to mush. Air-conditioning contractors were deluged with calls. Electric fans sold out at Home Depot and Lowe’s. The Red Cross activated its heat alert network, blasting out warnings to people to drink water and check on family and friends who lived alone. Libraries and churches set up cooling centers for the homeless or anyone who needed refuge.

Vivek Shandas, a professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University, drove around in his Prius with his eleven-year-old son, Suhail, measuring the temperature in different parts of the city. 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.

Nobody knows for sure how many people died during the seventy-two hours of extreme heat in the Pacific Northwest. The official count was 1,000, but heat is a subtle killer and doesn’t always make it onto death certificates. The actual number is likely far higher.

Jeff Chapman, who lived with his parents outside of town, was just starting to cook dinner when he saw the smoke and fire approaching. “Ten minutes later, our house was fully engulfed,” he said. “There was nothing we could do. We had nowhere to go.” As the blaze swallowed the house and the trees around it, Chapman rushed his parents, who were both in their sixties, into a trench that had been dug a few days earlier to repair a septic system. It wasn’t big enough for all three of them, so he grabbed a sheet of metal roofing nearby and laid it over them. Then he took refuge on some nearby railroad tracks, hoping the fire would pass. That’s when the power line crashed down across the trench where his parents were sheltering. “I knew my parents were in that hole and I’m watching the house burn and I’m thinking, Oh my God.” Chapman survived the inferno. His parents did not.

Scientists don’t fully understand how fast this heat can move or where it will appear next (until it happened, a killer heat wave in the Pacific Northwest seemed about as likely as snow in the Sahara). But there is one thing scientists do know: this is a form of heat that has been unleashed upon us through the burning of fossil fuels.

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.

In the summer of 2022, nine hundred million people in China—63 percent of the nation’s population—suffered under a two-month-long extreme heat wave that killed crops and sparked wildfires. “There is nothing in world climatic history which is even minimally comparable to what is happening in China,” one weather historian declared.

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.”

Heat lowers children’s test scores and raises the risk of miscarriage in pregnant women. Prolonged exposure increases death rates from heart and kidney disease. When people are stressed by heat, they are more impulsive and prone to conflict. Racial slurs and hate speech in social media spike. Suicides rise. Gun violence increases. There are more rapes and more violent crime. In Africa and the Middle East, studies have found a link between higher temperatures and the outbreak of civil war.

in the heat, the Fongoli chimps spend more time standing up and walking around than chimps that live in cooler places.

In our human ancestors, the evolution of the sweat gland is even more complex than the evolution of bipedalism. Bipedalism can be deduced from fossil bones. Sweat glands can’t. What is known about them can only be inferred by hints of behavior patterns found in other ways, and by the evidence we see in our own bodies and in the bodies of other animals.

There is a common but false belief that our ancestors in hot climates developed a taste for spicy foods because it made them sweat. In fact, a taste for spicy foods likely arose because before refrigeration, spices worked as a food preservative, which is particularly important in hot places where food spoils quickly. Garlic, onion, allspice and oregano are excellent bacteria killers, as are thyme, cinnamon, tarragon and cumin. “People who enjoyed food with antibacterial spices probably were healthier, especially in hot climates,” evolutionary biologist Paul Sherman said. “They lived longer and left more offspring. And they taught their offspring: ‘This is how to cook a mastodon.’”

Modern cities are empires of asphalt and concrete and steel, materials that absorb and amplify heat during the day, then radiate it out at night. Air conditioners exhaust hot air, exacerbating the problem of urban heat buildup. Downtown Phoenix can be as much as twenty degrees hotter than the surrounding area.

When a city like Phoenix goes dark, the comforts and conveniences of modern life fray. Without air-conditioning, temperatures in homes and office buildings soar. (Ironically, new, highly efficient LEED-certified buildings are tightly sealed, making them dangerous heat traps when the power goes out.) Traffic signals fail. Highways gridlock with people fleeing the overheated city. Without power, gas pumps don’t work, leaving vehicles stranded with empty tanks. Underground water pipes crack from the heat, and water pumps fail, leaving people scrounging for fresh water. Hospitals overflow with people suffering from heat exhaustion and heatstroke. If there are wildfires in the nearby mountains, the air will become hazy and difficult to breathe. If the blackout continues for more than thirty-six hours or so, it’s likely the National Guard will need to be called in to maintain order and control widespread looting and general mayhem.

Hiking, in fact, was one of the things he thought he’d love most about Phoenix when he moved here. But as it turned out, it was on a hike where his romance with Arizona ended. “I was out on a trail last summer, and it was ridiculously hot, and I had gone too far, and I don’t know—I just collapsed,” he told me. “I totally fainted. Banged my head on a rock. Scared the hell out of my girlfriend. She gave me water, and I was okay, but it made me think—what am I doing living here? Maybe it’s a genetic thing or whatever, but I can’t take it. This heat is dangerous.”

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.

“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.

One prominent scientist, Roger Revelle, speculated that in the twenty-first century the greenhouse effect might in fact exert “a violent effect on the earth’s climate.” In 1957, Revelle told a Congressional committee that the greenhouse effect might someday turn Southern California and Texas into “real deserts.”

In 2010, a major heat wave cooked Russia with temperatures as high as 104 degrees. More than 55,000 people died. She wondered, could this extreme event be directly attributed to climate change?

Otto wrote later in her book, Angry Weather. “Both studies were correct; they had simply asked different questions. One study focused on the heat record itself—the magnitude of the heat wave—while the other looked at the probability of the heat record being broken. So had climate change made the heat wave more likely? The answer was a resounding ‘yes.’”

By the time the heat wave hit the Pacific Northwest in 2021, they had analyzed nearly a dozen extreme events and their technique was well honed. It took Otto and her team exactly nine days to say that the heat wave that killed more than a thousand people and a billion sea creatures would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change.

The pressure waves that guide the jet stream, known as Rossby waves, are shaped by the temperature differences between the poles and the tropics. Think of them as guardrails for the jet stream, boundaries that keep it on track.

As the Arctic warms, it’s changing the temperature gradient between the poles and the tropics. That in turn weakens the Rossby waves, allowing the jet stream to meander and get twisty. Sometimes those twists trap hot air over a region, not allowing it to escape.

consider this: it means that a company like ExxonMobil, which, by some measures, is responsible for about 3 percent of historic global CO2 emissions, could be sued for 3 percent of the deaths or property destruction and economic losses from every climate-driven flood and heat wave—past, present, and future.

This is one reason why the discussion about “loss and damages” is so fraught in international climate talks, with the leaders of rich, industrialized nations in the Global North pushing hard to keep the topic out of the negotiations while politicians and activists in the climate-ravaged countries of the Global South say, very bluntly, “We’re the ones who are suffering. We’re the ones who are dying. You owe us, and you need to pay.”

In 2022, high food prices sparked riots in Sri Lanka and pushed an additional twenty-three million people toward starvation in sub-Saharan Africa.

Since 2019, the number of people facing acute food insecurity has soared—from 135 million to 345 million. In 2022, 50 million people in 45 countries were teetering on the edge of famine. Whatever the virtues of our modern food system may be, eliminating global hunger is clearly not one of them. More than 30 percent of the food we grow is wasted, left to rot in warehouses or tossed out by finicky consumers who decided they didn’t like the sauce on their pasta.

food productivity is already in decline due to human-made climate change. One recent Cornell University–led study found that global crop production today is 21 percent lower than it would have been without climate change. The losses were higher for warm regions—such as Africa, Latin American and the Caribbean—than for cooler regions such as North America and Europe. But as long as the heat keeps rising, the overall decline in crop productivity is likely to continue. For every degree Celsius of increase in global mean temperature, yields are expected to decrease by 7 percent for corn, 6 percent for wheat, and 3 percent for rice.

In a hotter world, rice—an important source of nutrition for hundreds of millions of people around the world—sucks more arsenic out of the soil, creating arsenic-laced kernels (arsenic-infused rice won’t kill you, but chronic exposure has been linked to breast and bladder cancer, as well as neurological issues in young children).

More CO2 also means more heat, and the effects of heat quickly overwhelm the benefits of higher CO2. It also makes some plants less nutritious. Rice grown in high-CO2 conditions has lower amounts of protein, iron, zinc, and B vitamins.

Pearl millet, an important grain in hot, dry regions of India and Africa, might thrive in other hot, dry places, including the American Southwest.

Sharply rising prices were a major driver of the French Revolution. Food protests not only kick-started the 1917 Russian Revolution from which the Soviet Union was born but also, ironically, contributed to the USSR’s demise. The Arab Spring uprising, which began in 2010 and jolted the political stability of the Middle East, was triggered in part as a protest against rising food prices.

During the summer of 2022, thousands of cows died from heat stress in Kansas feedlots and had to be buried in landfills and hastily dug pits.

In 2019, twenty-four hundred sheep were boiled alive when an ocean transport ship was delayed near Kuwait in 100-degree heat.

By one measure, the amount of heat being added to the ocean is equivalent to every person on the planet running a hundred microwave ovens all day and night.

As a result of the Blob, many of the kelp forests along the coast from California to Oregon have vanished, done in by warming and the army of purple sea urchins, which thrive in a hotter world. “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.”

These marine heat waves are driving a massive reorganization of underwater life, with many creatures migrating to cooler waters. “Right now, you can go diving off the Monterey pier and see spiny lobsters,” said Van Houtan. “They are a subtropical species that are normally found down in Baja. It’s absurd to see them up here.” (Less absurd, but considerably more dangerous, is the fact that warmer waters are also encouraging juvenile great white sharks to linger in the area.)

on my visits to the Great Barrier Reef, I’ve disembarked from the mainland at a dock only a stone’s throw from a massive coal transport terminal, where coal-filled barges carry Australian coal to Indonesia and China. Watching a coal barge float over the Great Barrier Reef is a surreal sight for anyone who cares about the future of the reef—or life on our planet.

In the US, there are no federal rules related to heat exposure for workers—indoors or out. Farmworkers, who are excluded from national laws requiring overtime pay, as well as the right to collective bargaining, are particularly vulnerable.

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 2023, the chances that the legislation will make it to the House floor for a vote anytime soon are virtually zero.

In the field where Perez fell, the young trees looked healthy and green and well tended. I pulled out my phone to take a photo, but I got a warning screen: iPhone needs to cool down before you can use it. A few hundred feet away, at the edge of the field beneath a Douglas fir, Perez’s wide-brimmed hat and water jug still sat on the ground.

Mercer argued that this whole system was much more unstable than anyone had yet realized. “I contend that a major disaster—a rapid five meter [16 foot] rise in sea level, caused by the deglaciation of West Antarctica—may be imminent,” he wrote, predicting it would lead to the “submergence of low-lying areas like Florida and the Netherlands.” Mercer didn’t know how soon this might happen, but when he made his calculations in the mid-1970s, he predicted that if fossil fuel consumption continued to accelerate, it could begin in fifty years. That is, right about now.

The Covid-19 pandemic is often compared to the 1918 influenza, which killed at least fifty million people globally. But it is perhaps more accurately seen as a preview of what’s to come.

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.

It took thirty years of detective work to determine that HIV likely emerged in 1908 in Cameroon, during a bloody interaction between a human and a chimpanzee.

Nipah virus was particularly scary. Nipah is a horrible pathogen, causing fever, brain swelling, and convulsions. Its fatality rate is as high as 75 percent. Of those who survive, one-third have neurological damage. It was initially isolated and identified in 1999 among pig farmers and people who had close contact with pigs in Malaysia and Singapore. Fruit bats hanging in the trees near a piggery dropped fruit infected with saliva, which the pigs ate. Nipah virus caused a relatively mild disease in pigs, but nearly three hundred human cases with more than a hundred deaths were reported. To stop the outbreak, more than a million pigs were slaughtered.

Nipah virus belongs to a family (paramyxoviruses) that includes measles and mumps, both of which spread really well in human populations. Small changes in Nipah could enhance its ability to spread human to human, creating a pandemic with a high mortality rate. “If Nipah did become more transmissible,” said Stanford’s Stephen Luby, “that would be a really Black Death plague–level concern.”

Wherever Aedes aegypti turns up, dengue, Zika, and other diseases are sure to follow. You can already see this happening in places like Nepal, which, until recently, was nearly free of mosquito-borne diseases. In 2015, Nepal had 135 cases of dengue. In the first nine months of 2022, there were 28,109 cases.

But Aedes aegypti, as well as other mosquitoes, are developing immunity to many commercial insecticides. “We are losing the war,” says Galveston National Laboratory scientific director Scott Weaver.

Air-conditioning is also a big energy suck. Globally, air-conditioning accounts for nearly 20 percent of the total electricity used in buildings, which means it contributes a significant amount of the greenhouse gas pollution from buildings that are heating up the atmosphere. The hotter the planet gets, the more air-conditioning feels necessary. The more it feels necessary, the more electricity is required to power it. And as long as some portion of that electricity is generated by fossil fuels, that means more greenhouse gas pollution—which further heats up the climate. 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.