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

by Jeff Goodell

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.