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. 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.

The harshest truth about life on a superheated planet is this: as temperatures rise, a lot of living things will die, and that may include people you know and love.

In March of 2022, a heat wave invaded the ice-bound continent, pushing temperatures seventy degrees—seventy degrees!—above normal.

Temperatures in parts of the world could rise so high that just stepping outside for a few hours, another study warned, “will result in death even for the fittest of humans.”

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.

Put another way, dehydration can exacerbate heat exhaustion and heatstroke, but you can still die of heatstroke and be well hydrated.

For twenty years, I lived in upstate New York, which is one of the best places to live in America if you take climate change seriously. It’s not too hot in the summer, there is plenty of farmland and water, it’s far from the rising seas, it has a politically engaged local population, easy access to the Adirondacks, a strong arts culture, and decent transportation, including one of the great train rides in America down the Hudson to New York City.

I asked Otto if she can imagine a day in the near future when a company like ExxonMobil is held liable in a court of law for the deaths in an extreme heat wave. “Yes, I can,” she replied without hesitation. “Not only can I imagine it. I believe it will happen sooner than you think.”

Commodity traders make money off wild price swings, shippers make money off people desperate for grain, fertilizer manufacturers make money off farmers desperate to maximize their yields, and protofascist politicians are happy to exploit rising food prices as evidence of the failure of democracy.

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. In the US, 30 million acres of prime agricultural land is devoted to growing corn and soybeans to make fuel (mostly ethanol) for gas-guzzling cars and trucks. Aquifers are being pumped dry, often to grow water-hungry crops like rice and almonds and alfalfa in places where there is little or no surface water.

One metric ton of plastic enters the ocean every four seconds (at this rate, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050).

Coral reefs have been around for about 250 million years, evolving into some of the most complex, diverse, and beautiful living structures on Earth. And yet, if nothing changes, within forty or fifty years they will be crumbling ruins.

“Seeing this glacier makes you realize that things you think will always be there might not be. That’s quite a thing to get your head around.”

Even under the optimistic climate scenarios, Carlson estimates that the coming decades will see about 300,000 first encounters between species that normally don’t interact, leading to roughly 15,000 spillovers in which viruses enter new hosts. Vineet Menachery, a virologist at the Galveston lab, called the prospect “harrowing.”

In less than two weeks in 2003, fifteen thousand people in France died as a direct result of the heat wave. Nearly a thousand lived in central Paris. Many of the victims lived alone, in top-floor garrets, or attic apartments, where the heat built up beneath zinc roofs and literally cooked people as if they were in an oven. It took weeks for all the bodies to be recovered. Entire apartment buildings had to be evacuated because of the pervasive smell of death.

Just to give you a sense of what this means on a global scale, there are about three trillion trees on the planet—which works out to about 422 trees for every person on Earth. Humans are responsible for the loss of fifteen billion trees a year. About five billion new trees are planted or sprout annually, yielding a net loss each year of ten billion trees. So as much as people may love trees, in the big picture, we are not very good to them. Since the beginning of human civilization, the number of trees on the planet has dropped by 46 percent.

We can save the future or we can save the past, but we can’t do both.”

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.

I met people while researching this book who believe that the political and economic systems that go with them are unsalvageable. You might be able to retrofit the buildings of Paris, they argue, but you can’t retrofit the politics of Paris—or anywhere else, for that matter. The solution is to burn it all down and start over. So the sooner we get on with that, they argue, the better.

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. Wherever we may be headed, we are all on this journey together.