Title:

The Heat Will Kill You First

Author:

Jeff Goodell

Category:

NonFiction

Rating:

Date Reviewed:

February 12, 2024

he Heat Will Kill You First has the subtitle Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. Goodell begins his book by recounting the story of the heat dome which settled over the Pacific Northwest in the summer of 2021. The Pacific Northwest is renowned for its temperate climate - when I moved to Seattle in 2005, few houses had air conditioning, because no one needed it. A summer day in the 80s was a hot day. But the heat dome sent temperatures higher than 100 degrees, with devastating effects on agriculture, sea life, and life in general. Goodell's point is that if the most idyllic summer spot in America can suffer from heat catastrophe, then no place is safe.

Heat is invisible and so it is discounted as a threat. Yet heat already kills more people than hurricanes or floods. Goodell gives the reader a detailed description of how a human dies of heat stroke. Basically, you cannot sweat enough to cool yourself down and your organs fail. It doesn't matter how young or in shape you are in - when it gets too hot, the heat will kill you. Indeed, big muscles generate extra heat as they are exercised, being a star athlete is not going to save you.

More CO2 in the atmosphere might be favorable for plant life (though plant studies with a CO2 rich atmosphere reveal that the resulting fruits and vegetables have fewer nutrients and vitamins even if they grow bigger) but the harshness of extra heat more than offsets any benefit the plants derive from the extra carbon dioxide. On a hotter Earth, the climate is wilder and more unpredictable - farmer don't know what to plant or when because weather events are so variable. Now the crops are vulnerable to more frequent extreme weather events, such a baking heat waves, floods, or choking wildfire smoke. For every one degree Celsius increase in global mean temperature, yields are expected to decrease by 7 percent for corn, 6 percent for wheat and 3 percent for rice.

Cities are heat islands. Concrete, asphalt, glass and steel trap heat - a city can be fifteen degrees hotter than the surrounding countryside. Of course, there are few trees in cities, and little shade to provide cooling. Air conditioners cool the interiors of our structures, but that interior heat is just blasted out into the external environment. Even if we had the will to redesign our cities to be more temperature tolerant, the expense would be enormous. A tragedy will occur if the power grid should fail during a heat dome event, and all the air conditioners are shut off.

Goodell joined an expedition sailing down to Antarctica. The scientists wanted to look at the massive Thwaites glacier. This glacier holds enough ice to raise sea levels around the world by ten feet. Right now, the glacier is locked onto Antarctica, but warmer ocean waters are swirling at the glacier's tongue. If that collapses, an immense volume of ice may slide into the ocean, with devastating consequences for us all. Scientists are trying to measure just how warm the water is, so they attach sensors on seals - when the seals swim beneath, the sensors gather underwater data. When the seals surface, the data is transmitted back to the scientists.

Heat enables viruses to expand their territories. Ticks and mosquitos can venture into new geographic areas. Soon the United States may have deal with outbreaks of Dengue fever, malaria, and diseases like Lyme, Zika or Hendra. Or a ghastly malady called Crimean Congo Hemorrhagic Fever, which has a fatality rate between 10 and 40 percent as the victim bleeds from every orifice. As climate change and habitat destruction continues, bats search for new homes, and as they establish new territories, they carry viruses to new areas. Bats have super immune systems, and so can carry these vectors without falling sick themselves. Covid-19 is thought to have been first transmitted by a diseased bat. The forecast is more epidemics plaguing humanity in the future.

The last chapter in this book is titled The White Bear. It about polar bears and how they need ice for hunting seals. Without ice, polar bears will starve. Of course, it is not just iconic species like polar bears who will go extinct, there are a million species at risk. By 2100, the Earth will be a much more impoverished state. That so many animals will perish saddens me greatly. The greed of humanity will destroy our own civilization, and we have no one to blame but ourselves, but the animal kingdom did nothing wrong and yet must also suffer the consequences of our actions. It is a depressing finale to this book.

In the epilogue, Goodell writes: "Thanks to decades of innovation, clean energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel energy in most parts of the world. That means we now have the means to lift hundreds of millions of people out of energy poverty without relying on coal, gas or oil. Right now, our dependence on fossil fuels is all about inertia, political will, and big oil and gas companies wanting to milk their investments as long as they can." I read this book in spring of 2024, an election year. Yet despite the magnitude of the threat, climate change is rarely mentioned in the campaigning. If I were a parent or grandparent, climate change would be my number-one priority, because my offspring face no greater threat. Sadly, I think inertia will win out, the political will to tell the American population hard truths is nonexistent, and the Big Oil companies will gleefully destroy the future for quarterly profits today.