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

by Jeff Goodell

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

“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.”

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.

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.

“For cities, the urban heat island effect has had far more impact on local temperatures than climate change itself,” said David Hondula,

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

Instead of framing the crisis as a future event, something that will impact our children and grandchildren and generations to come, as it often is, Otto’s work is proof that it is happening now, in real time.

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

Because we live on land, we often think of heat as a terrestrial event. But as temperatures rise, it’s what happens in the ocean that may have the biggest impact on our future.

Nowhere on the planet does heat have as much leverage over our future as it does in Antarctica.

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.