BOOK REVIEW: THE HEAT WILL KILL YOU FIRST

With summer winding down and cool air moving into the mountains this weekend, Editor Lunch decided it was time for me to enjoy a bit of light reading. His choice of literature: The Heat Will Kill You First – Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell.

Goodell explores the concept of heat from the Earth’s inception, how thermal energy flows through living things, and the dire consequences of a warming world, along with strategies for managing it. The research is scientifically robust, filled with worst-case scenarios, and provides a chilling account of how we are, quite honestly, doomed—at least if we don’t intervene soon.

The first chapter breaks down how the body malfunctions under both external and internal heat stress. While reading it, I was sweating, oddly conscious of my heartbeat, deliberately breathing, and needed to take off my sweatshirt.

In the author’s own words, “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 […] you are in big trouble.” He illustrates these mishaps with the unsettling example of the Chung-Gerrish family, who tragically died on a hike in 2021 (mom, dad, newborn and a dog inexplicably out for a stroll in 109-degree heat) in Mariposa. 

Reading this book, especially this chapter, was like doing a reverse body scan meditation. I became acutely aware of the maladaptations in each of my appendages, the lack of resilience in my cells, and the whole extreme crisis of heat until my entire body was completely tensed. It’s surreal to think such a hazard could lie so close. Yet every year, people—even healthy ones—die less than 200 miles away in Death Valley. And it’s getting hotter.

Part of Goodell’s goal, I believe, was to establish some urgency in the public to combat climate change. However, I imagine some folks (i.e., those not plagued by panic disorder) might also find a sense of wonder in understanding the world’s connection to heat and the complexities it brings, rather than succumbing to hypochondria.

For those people: expect to find answers to your most burning questions about heat between the covers of this book. How will people in Paris retrofit their buildings while defending their culture? Why are we warm-blooded? How did people get rich off selling “cold cheap air”? Why don’t scientists name heatwaves the way we name hurricanes?

But most importantly, Goodell approaches the big question head-on: How screwed are we? 

Screwed, it appears.

He talks plainly about fossil fuels, noting that if we continue to burn them, the planet will get hotter. That will lead to the inevitable death of millions of species on Earth, including humans.

Each living creature, whether it’s crawling, swaying, flying, or walking, has a temperature range it can survive in, or a “Goldilocks Zone,” he wrote. The more we continue to burn gas and oil, the more we push these zones and kill life as we know it.

Not one corner of the Earth is spared. Goodell describes a horrifying scuba dive, where his partner touched a sea star, and its skin came right off. In fact, all the sea stars he saw were dying. Farmers’ crops are failing. Pandemics are more common and less predictable. Polar bears are hungry.

The severity of heat risks is dramatically underestimated, Goodell writes. Americans move away from storms but gravitate toward places with high heat risk, like the Sun Belt. Goodell himself moved from cool New York to Austin, Texas, because he fell in love with a southern girl while she was up north to escape the heat.

People have a complicated relationship with heat—it’s in our nature to love it, he explains. Ever since humans evolved from Africa, they have been anxious to return to a similar warm and temperate climate. One that, frankly, doesn’t exist anymore.

Is there any good news? Well, accountability is a good way to start.

Some scientists want to establish clear proof of the connection between anthropogenic climate change and extreme weather so that we can restrict the companies that pollute the most. A multi-billion dollar lawsuit against ExxonMobil is likely—and sooner to happen than we think, one scientist said.

It’s not crazy to imagine that technology could provide solutions, either. Electric cars or machines that suck carbon out of the atmosphere may be a way forward. And then there are alternatives to methane-producing beef products – Goodell suggests crickets. Seriously.

But in the meantime, Goodell warns, we can’t let heat deaths become our new normal. As more and more people die, something “we accept and don’t think too much about in our everyday lives,” we risk becoming complacent in our quest to reduce greenhouse gases and stop the heat crisis.