Interview with best-selling author of 'The Heat Will Kill You First'

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

Jeff Goodell, Little Brown

***** (5 stars)

“When heat comes, it’s invisible. It doesn’t bend tree branches or blow hair across your face to let you know it’s arrived.” With these words, award-winning US journalist Jeff Goodell begins his latest book, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. Goodell, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine who’s been writing about climate change for 22 years, is the author of six previous acclaimed books, including The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilised World, which was a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017. Heat is Goodell’s seventh work of non-fiction and is already a New York Times best-seller. It’s arguably also one of the most eloquent books — and one of the most terrifying — to hit the global bookshelf. Because Heat brings home the perilous urgency of the current moment like no other.

Goodell’s goal in writing it is to convince us to think about heat differently. And he has traversed the globe to show just how heat is the first-order effect of the climate crisis, the very engine of planetary chaos. Yet, he insists, “if you’d asked me what heat was 15 years ago, I couldn’t have told you”. He came to think about heat differently on a very hot day five years ago in Phoenix, Arizona. “I had to walk downtown to a meeting, and my heart started pounding and after 15 blocks I was feeling dizzy, and it just occurred to me that heat is not just a number on a thermometer — it’s a lethal force that can kill you. And that was the ‘aha’ moment where the book began.”

As he reveals in Heat, there is no escaping that we are now more than halfway to 2°C of warming from pre-industrial temperatures, which, he writes, “scientists have long warned is the threshold for dangerous climate change”. Yet, as he emphasises to me now, “the term ‘global warming’ is one that is profoundly mismatched with the reality of its meaning”. He says: “Obviously, if you understand the science, you think differently about it. But to the average person, when you say a phrase like ‘global warming’ or talk about the temperature rising by 1-2°C, it doesn’t sound so bad. So it’s not surprising that a lot of people don’t grasp what the implications are for our rapidly warming world.”

Early on in this propulsive book, he drives home just how deadly not grasping those implications can be. In its first chapter, he tells the story of a young, fit, outdoorsy couple who’d traded city life for a house in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada valley during the pandemic. Ignoring heat warnings, they set out early one morning on a hot day with their one-year-old daughter and their dog for a 13km hike to the Merced River and back. A search party found them all dead on the trail days later. Their deaths initially puzzled authorities, says Goodell. “But after about a month of investigation, they realised they had all died of heatstroke. And I wanted to tell this tale because it underscores that everyone is vulnerable, even young people in good shape.”

The couple’s dog, he notes, likely got into trouble first. Unlike humans, dogs cannot sweat and are therefore vulnerable to heat. He goes on to delve into the science, not only of heatstroke and heat exhaustion, detailing their effects on the body, but also the history and science of evolution to explain how human bodies developed the mechanism — sweat — that allows us to deal with hot weather. Along the way, the reader also learns how elephants, camels and bees, to name just a few animals, cope with heat. Because as he writes in Heat, all living things share one simple fate: if the temperature they’re used to — what scientists sometimes call their “Goldilocks Zone” — rises too high too fast, they’ll die.

Along with descriptions of salmon boiling in rivers and bumble bees falling out of the sky in recent heatwaves, Goodell writes potently about the cascading effects of a warming planet on all living things: “Whether it’s the salmon in the creeks and rivers, the oak trees or bats or frogs, they all have to migrate to cooler places or die.” He devotes an entire chapter to the many microbes and their unwanted vectors that are also trying to seek out their Goldilocks Zone. “As the climate warms up, they’re moving to new places, and that’s having huge implications in Africa, as mosquitoes that carry malaria move to new places. We’re seeing the first emergence of malaria in the southern US in many decades, while dengue fever and the Zika virus are emerging in new places such as Mexico City.”

Whether it’s the dire implications of the looming “great migration” — human or otherwise — or those of an oceanic heatwave known as “the blob”, the rapid melting of ice sheets in West Antarctica, the plight of outdoor workers everywhere — be it in India, Qatar or the US — or the complex, divisive legacy of air-conditioning, there’s no vital issue, it seems, that Goodell doesn’t illuminate in this book. Indeed, the extraordinary power of Goodell’s narrative is the way he renders cutting-edge science understandable, adroitly interweaving scientific detail, relevant statistics and conversations with scientists with the stories of ordinary individuals to drive home the invisible power of “this form of heat that has been unleashed upon us through the burning of fossil fuels”.

The tragedy of the climate crisis, says Goodell, “is that not only have scientists understood the implications of burning fossil fuels for decades, but the fossil fuel companies themselves have known this for decades also”. He continues: “But even if we cut using fossil fuels tomorrow — which, of course, we are not going to do — we will not go back to having a climate that resembles the one we all grew up in. There is no going back to normal. We have crossed over into a new climate, a new reality. Until we get to net zero, the temperature will continue to rise, and when we do get to net zero, that will stabilise the temperatures at where they are now — but it will not bring them back to what they were 50 years ago.”

Yet he insists it is not beyond our reach to make the difficult, necessary changes to prevent us all from crossing the silent borders of the Goldilocks Zone. But it will, he writes, “require political leadership and a deeper understanding of our connection with one another and with the world we live in”. Should we fail to do this and pass out of that zone, he argues, “it will change the dynamics of life on this planet in a big way”. However, he says: “It is not about being too late. There is no ‘too late’. There is only better and worse. But every tonne of CO₂ that we keep out of the atmosphere is a step in the right direction.”

JEFF GOODELL ON BOOKS THAT HAVE INFLUENCED HIM

The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future by Richard B Alley. This book, about underscoring and understanding the deep dimensions of time and climate change, is one of the first books I read about climate change when I started covering it. I’ve gone back to it many times. Alley is one of the great scientists and climate scientists of our time, and even though the book is 15 or 20 years old, it is still as relevant today as ever.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, this book is about understanding what living organisms are set to face as the climate changes, and it also discusses this issue in contrast with other extinctions. It’s a great book.

Annals of the Former World by John McPhee. This book won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. It’s a kind of cliché for many writers like me to mention John McPhee, because he is such a master. But this book about the geology of North America is somehow told in a human way that is masterful and explains incredibly complex science in a readable way. I now think of geology as the most fascinating of all natural sciences. But when I first read John McPhee, I had no interest in geology, as I thought it was just about rocks. He showed me as a writer that there was a way to write about rocks, and about rocks in time, that was as compelling as any detective novel, and his eloquence and specificity were a huge influence on me. I think everyone who writes about climate change owes a debt to John McPhee.

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey. Published in 1968, this was a hugely influential book for me, because Abbey was such a rebel, and so ruthlessly devoted to nature and the natural world around him — as opposed to humans. I turned to the vividness of his writing, especially on heat, several times while I was working on my book.

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, and, indeed, all books by James Lovelock. I wrote a profile of Lovelock for Rolling Stone about 10 years ago and was lucky enough to spend a couple of weeks with him at his house in England. He and I took long walks together, and our conversations were amazing. His Gaia theory and the idea of feedbacks and of the Earth as this self-modulating sort of system, was profoundly influential to me, even though I realised it was a simplistic model. But the idea that the Earth is an organism that is alive and seeks out its own natural balance, a kind of homeostasis, I think is one of the most important ideas in natural science of the last century. Even though there are problems with the idea, I think it’s one of those big metaphors that helped shape my thinking and the thinking of a lot of scientists.