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

by Jeff Goodell

This sense of incrementalism also holds true with the climate crisis. The Earth is getting hotter due to the burning of fossil fuels. This is a simple truth, as clear as the moon in the night sky. So far, thanks to 250 years of hell-bent fuel consumption, which has filled the atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2), global temperatures have risen by 2.2 degrees since the preindustrial era and are on track to warm by 6 degrees or more by the end of the century. The more oil, gas, and coal we burn, the hotter it will get.

And because CO2 stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years, it’s not going to cool off when we finally stop emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. All that will do is stop the increase in warming. It will not reverse it. Until we figure out a way to suck massive amounts of CO2 out of the sky, we will be stuck with a hotter planet.

When the next pandemic hits, the chances are good it will be caused by a pathogen that leapt from an animal that was seeking out a cooler place to live.

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.”

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.

But extreme heat is a force beyond anything we have reckoned with before. It may be a human creation, but it is godlike in its power and prophecy. Because all living things share one simple fate: if the temperature they’re used to—what scientists sometimes call their Goldilocks Zone—rises too far, too fast, they die.

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.

There is a lot of confusion about the relationship between water and heat exhaustion and heatstroke. Water is necessary to keep sweat flowing. If you get dehydrated, you can’t sweat. And if you can’t sweat, you can’t cool off. But drinking water does not in itself cool off inner-core body temperatures. Put another way, dehydration can exacerbate heat exhaustion and heatstroke, but you can still die of heatstroke and be well hydrated.

A well-hydrated human can sweat up to three quarts per hour, but no matter how much water you drink, your body can only replace about two quarts of water per hour—so if you are in a hot place for a long time, dehydration is a concern.

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.

Birds, which are flying dinosaurs, are also warm-blooded. (“Birds are not like flying dinosaurs,” a scientist once corrected me. “They are flying dinosaurs.”)

As temperatures soar in the coming years, the real question is not whether superheated cities are sustainable. Phoenix is not going to melt into the desert and Chennai will not return to the jungle. The question is, sustainable for who? And at what cost? As cities grow and the heat rises, the future of Phoenix and Chennai, and many cities like them, is of a kind of temperature apartheid, where some people chill in a bubble of cool and others simmer in debilitating heat. This is not how you build a just, equitable, or peaceful world.

And because bumblebees are important pollinators in wild landscapes (as well as for crops like tomatoes, squash, and berries), the decline of bumblebees ripples through ecosystems.

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

The political consequences of these massive shifts of people are impossible to overstate. Here in the US, unfounded fears of brown people invading the country and stealing jobs and committing crimes are disguised as a policy debate about immigration. Fear of outsiders also fuels the rise of extreme right-wing politics in Europe and Australia.

Climate-wise, Texas is the belly of the beast. “If you live in Kansas, you don’t really have to worry about hurricanes or wildfires, and if you live in Oregon, you have to worry about wildfires and drought, not worry about hurricanes,” says Texas climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. “If you live in Texas, you have to worry about everything.”

Orlowski pointed out that there are lots of Border Patrol agents in places where it is easy to cross. And far, far fewer in places where it is hot and dangerous to cross. “Part of their strategy is to funnel migrants through the hottest, most dangerous regions of the border,” Orlowski explained. “So, basically, the US Border Patrol has figured out a way to weaponize heat,” I said. “Yes, that’s one way to think about it,” he replied.

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

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.

The more contact these bats have with other animals, as well as people, the more opportunities the viruses they carry have to spill over. “SARS-COV-2 has been a humanitarian disaster,” Plowright said. “But can you imagine if it was killing half the people it infected after some period of asymptomatic transmission? That’s the risk we are taking here. And the quicker the climate changes, the bigger the risk grows.”

In the end, the most enduring legacy of air-conditioning may be the divide it has created between the cool and the damned. And the hotter it gets, the bigger that gap will grow. This is not a technological failure as much as it is a cultural and psychological issue. The simple truth is that in the second half of the twentieth century, prosperous Americans got hooked on comfort, with little thought about the cost of that comfort to others, to the welfare of other species, or to the world around them. That addiction has now spread to millions of people around the world, who find they too cannot live without cheap cold air.

And I could see this world we were skiing through was vanishing fast. In a month or so, after the temperature warmed a few more degrees, the ice would all crack up and melt away. The bears had evolved to be part of this cycle, exquisitely adapted, with their white coats and their big strong seal-grabbing front paws. This cold world was their Goldilocks Zone. But if I learned anything on my trip to Baffin, it was that their Goldilocks Zone was disappearing fast. Just like ours.

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.

Despite all we have learned about the risks of life on a superheated planet, despite all our technological sophistication and our knowledge of history, we are still hiking up that same mountain trail, one that leads not just to a vista point atop of a pile of skeletons, but into the desert beyond the Goldilocks Zone. “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.”

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, looked back at 2023 from the vantage point of the future: “Every year for the rest of your life will be one of the hottest [on] record. This in turn means that 2023 will end up being one of the coldest years of this century. Enjoy it while it lasts.”