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

by Jeff Goodell

He can see that in, say, Albuquerque, when a dry tropical air mass moves in, the mortality rate spikes by 15 percent. If he does this correlation enough times with air masses in any given city, he can get a pretty good estimate for how many people that air mass will kill whenever it arrives.

In 2011, the combined stress of drought and extreme heat killed off 10 percent of the urban trees in Texas. Nearly six million city trees died in just a few months. In the coming years, it may get a lot worse.

Seoul, South Korea, spent $900 million to remove a highway and restore the Cheonggyecheon Stream in the middle of the city, which not only opened up much-needed green space, but also cooled the neighborhood around the stream by as much as ten degrees.

France is spending $40 billion to expand the Métro line beyond the inner city, adding 125 miles of track (mostly underground) and building 68 new Métro stations that will make it easier for people who live in the distant suburbs to get into the city without driving. The expansion, known as the Grand Paris Express and scheduled to be completed in 2030, will take 150,000 cars off the road.

Around us, ice-entombed mosses were thawing out for the first time in at least forty-five thousand years, suggesting, one researcher said, that temperatures are now warm enough “to melt all the ice in the eastern Canadian Arctic.” As we skied along, we found that many glaciers were a mile or so farther back than where they were marked on our 1950s-era topographic maps.

We have known for more than a century about the climate consequences of burning fossil fuels. And it wasn’t just the scientists who knew. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson was warned, as have been many presidents after him. By 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil) not only knew that decades of burning fossil fuels would heat up the atmosphere, but developed in-house climate models that projected those changes with remarkable accuracy. Despite that knowledge, we have not only continued burning fossil fuels, we have continued burning them with reckless abandon. In a sense, you could say we have built a heat-fueled rocketship that is taking us, for better or worse, on a trip beyond the Goldilocks Zone.

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.

Hurricanes are wiping out cities on the Gulf Coast with ever more muscle, crops are failing, delivery drivers are dropping dead on the job on hot summer days and yet Matthew McConaughey is still doing TV ads for gas-guzzling SUVs.

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.

“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.”

Asphalt parking lots feel like ruins from a lost civilization.