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

by Jeff Goodell

hot city is different than a hot jungle or a hot desert. Urban heat feels crueler and more intimate than the heat you feel in nature. Despite

Climate change compounds risks for cities: heat, floods, failing infrastructure, displaced people.

That means more green space, more trees, more water, more shade, more thermally intelligent urban design.

The second, and more difficult, challenge is figuring out what to do with existing buildings and cityscapes. The vast majority of existing buildings are ill-suited for the extreme climate of the twenty-first century: poorly insulated, poorly sited, dependent on air-conditioning to keep them habitable.

Despite the city’s many parks, it has one of the lowest tree canopy covers of any city in the world

There is also the question of equity. The basic truth is: rich people get nice trees, poor people get weeds.

But perhaps the biggest hurdle is the gap between the grand visions of architects and urban planners and the reality of what might actually get built.

because they’re showing us what’s going to happen to us,” says Steven Amstrup,

A warmer Arctic alters the thermodynamic balance of the Earth’s atmosphere, changing the pressure gradients that create heat waves, and altering rainfall patterns, especially in Europe and Asia,

Rapidly melting ice sheets in the Arctic also accelerates sea-level rise, inundating coastal cities around the world, stranding billions of dollars’ worth of real estate and forcing tens of millions of people to move to higher ground.

Arctic is also speeding up the melting of permafrost, releasing vast quantities ...

More methane means more warming, which will release still more methane—when scientists talk about a looming climate catastrophe, this is one ...

there are also viruses and pathogens from an earlier time, which, as I mentioned in a previous chapter, when thawed and released into our world, could unleash a global pandemic