The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorc… (2024)

Full disclosure: I didn't just get an early look at THE HEAT WILL KILL YOU FIRST thanks to NetGalley; I read and bid (a lot) for the proposal when I was an executive editor at Thomas Dunne Books because it was amazing, promising a book as deep and affecting as Goodell's THE WATER WILL COME. Sadly, I lost HEAT at auction, and while that normally makes one bitter and hoping a book will fail, I feel the exact about this one. I was anxious to read the whole thing; heck, that's half the reason I bid on it. And, wow, does it not disappoint.

This is more than just a dry recitation of what the heat from burning fossil fuels is doing to the planet. It's a travelogue of a dying Earth, which makes the statistics and effects of the heat come alive (albeit by killing). For every sublime moment, such as being the first people ever to see the front of an Antarctic glacier before strapping sensors to seals so that what the heat is doing to those glaciers can be measured when the seals swim under them; there's a terrifying moment, such as hungry polar bear stalking the Arctic with no place left to go as the pack ice melts and only the author to eat. The writing is riveting and in its simple, straightforward horror would make Jeff Vandermeer jealous.

What gets me most is this. The whole week the book went to auction, it was well over 100 degrees in the city. Just brutal, baking weather. And only a few years later the heat is worse, with a heat dome smother much of the South and Canadian wildfires choking the north. In a weird coincidence, the family of hikers who die in the first chapter from the heat were mentioned last weekend in a story about another group of hikers who were killed by the heat. It's only getting worse, the heat, and this is the book that will tell everyone not what's coming, but what's already here.

And the only way to stop it is to stop burning fossil fuels. Yes, alternate power (solar, wind) is being adopted faster than most thought, so there's some hope, but clearly tens, if not hundreds of millions will die. With luck, some of them can be saved if this book, well, lights a fire under the right people.

Exceptional. Incredible writing for both the narratives and dispensing critical science information. An absolute must read

Terrifying in the extreme......

Here in Tampa, Florida we’re already realizing that this enduring and record breaking Summer heat may well be the coolest Summer that will ever be. Heat and humidity combined have pushed the heat index into breathtaking (literally) territory, and I have lived here since the late 1970s and lived without air conditioning until the early 1990s.

Sadly, this book did not offer much hope for the planet.

The possibility of atmospheric and oceanic heating have been predicted as early as 1856, and was taken to the US Federal government by scientists in the 1950s. Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House during his tenure, and Ronald Reagan promptly removed them. Once again scientists insistently presented evidence for the need for the government to act during the 1980s.

And here we are.

Paris, meanwhile, has been remodeling the city by introducing no car zones, planting trees, extending the metro system to move people in and out of the city without automobiles, and examining redesigning beautiful old buildings in ways that will allow air flow and reduce the need for grid breaking electricity. This information about Paris surprised and impressed me, and provides a little bit of hope that some communities will be able to extend their stay.

Florida will be underwater and that will end a useless political folly that has stubbornly refused to address anything except money making destruction.

I step down from my soapbox and wish us all well, not knowing what will come next.

Wow. This book makes me optimistically depressed. Is that a thing? Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First is a very readable book about one of the largest consequences of climate change, heat, and the consequences of the heat. He avoids being highly scientific and data driven, incorporating this information into a book that is more readable for the average reader. He does a great job of mixing in stories of real people and real communities impacted by the rising temperatures, ranging from a family on the outskirts of Silicon Valley to the deadly heat wave in Paris in 2003 - and how history, culture and politics can make it so difficult to adapt. With the highs of knowing the things we can do to naturally stay cooler and avoid the energy suck of air conditioning to the lows of actually making changes, Goodell leaves the reader with hope for practical solutions and frustrated with everything impeding those solutions. He brings awareness to just how deadly heat can be to the human body, sometimes unexpectedly. He reminds the reader of the many different ways trees are a difference maker, while pointing out how hard it seems to be for us to appreciate their value. And he makes me never want to spend time around standing water (and the mosquitoes that breed in it) during the heat of summer. This is really well done, connecting an impending crisis in deeply personal ways without ever coming across as overly preachy or angry. A complimentary copy was provided by the publisher. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

I’m going to create a new shelf, called “climate change voyeurism” where books like this, that essentially profit and benefit from expressing outrage at “climate change“ without actually doing anything, pushing the discussion forward, or generally having a coherent opinion other than “climate change is bad, here look” will go. Unfortunately, this might book might be the only one on that shelf because reading anything else like this might give me an aneurysm.

Topics covered are fascinating and impactful at a high level. They are presented poorly and without context or nuance. Best use of this book is to skim the title chapters, pop open a few browser tabs and then do your own research.

I will say if you’re reading this review and genuinely curious about these topics, Vaclav Smil does a great job (with unfortunately fairly academic prose), breaking out actual core contributors to climate change around agriculture, concrete production, industrial manufacturing, smelting that type of thing. one of the takeaways from that book was that eating beef is a huge driver of greenhouse gas, methane, production. To the extent that eating 20% less beef, say, skipping a day a week, is it equivalent of doubling the gas mileage on your car on an emitted CO2 basis. Unfortunately cow emissions is less sexy then pointing at a glacier and making a crying face emoji😢 and as such does not make an appearance in this book.

Writer is annoying. There is kind of a meandering writing style with interjected opinion on everything. At one point he’s talking about how he’s excited to go on a boat, and there are mechanical issues holding them up. Pages are spent on this, which didn’t seem relevant at all to the discussion of Antarctic glaciers, other than the fact that people take boats to go to the glaciers. Like thanks? I’m glad your propeller got fixed or whatever.

Much of what is presented is presented without nuance or even factual basis. The author asserts at one point that “high heats are bad” and that “cell membranes break down at 107 F.” Which like, agreed that high temps suck, but also no cells universally don’t. A simple google search shows hundreds of papers diving into the whole spectrum of proteins and various other squiggly bits that make up cells and how they are impacted by various temperatures from 100-200F. Also if you just like think for a second about the fact that it’s been over 107°, and you haven’t melted into a puddle of amino acids…. This is like the overconfident debate kid in your HS spewing absolute BS on a topic he only looked up on a Wikipedia page earlier that day.

We’re airdropped into a variety of topics that loosely have the theme of “heat“ but they don’t really go together in any sort of reasonable way. This isn’t telling a story. This is a collection of vignettes about things this guy thought was interesting while he travels to cool places and nods thoughtfully. This reads like somebody wasting a book advance on travel. And the result is like a painting with 14 different styles. A collage your nephew made for a school project. Like, wow lil buddy, it’s neat how you put the dying polar bear next to the camel.

Later, in the “what can we do” portion of the book, There is this half chapter long, love letter to a person who decided to “name heat waves.”

that’s their contribution to climate change discourse.

they’re going to put names on heat waves.

and we’re gonna spend the majority of a chapter praising them.

Not that they are going to research something. Not that they have accomplished something new on communicating about heat waves, an updated text alert or other bulletin, or maybe even that they chose to spend a Saturday at the dog park giving out cold water to panting dogs. No. They’re gonna pull some names out of a hat and call the heat waves whatever’s written down.

"oh boy, we're going to call this one Titan on account of it being big."

For this, the person was labeled as “brave and misunderstood.” Bro.... It’s not brave to call something a name. (What is in a name? For by any other name this idea would be just as dumb) It’s not “misunderstood” if everyone understands the concept and is mocking you. If everyone’s calling your idea stupid, maybe consider that it could be stupid.

And the infuriating part of all of this is that this is contrasted with what I consider to be important topics around climate change. There's a need for a book that isn't Vollmann's impenetrable, meandering and depressing prose, or Bill Gates moralizing as he transcribes whatever savior-complex nonsense he's musing about while he putputs around on his private jet.

This book is just annoying. It doesn’t really assist the discussion. It’s just another person lamenting about how climate change is bad, like thanks bro I didn’t know that before. And maybe doubly so the reason I find myself so frustrated, there are some interesting tidbits buried in here around research and obscure projects that if better done, could’ve drawn together into a more interesting and productive book. The discussion of the acceleration around melting glaciers was fantastic. But in whole I feel like I wasted my time reading this. Oh well, at least someone is naming the heat waves.

Reading about the heat in June seemed very appropriate - temperatures in the northern hemisphere were already soaring and many people were bracing themselves for another scorching summer. But this book is worth reading at any time, because even on colder days we should not forget that the heat is here to stay.

As many authors and experts have noted, the climate crisis is hard to define and comprehend, but easy to ignore. And denial is the worst possible strategy for humanity right now. So in trying to get people to act, it is good to focus not on the complicated and sometimes ambiguous science, but on the very real and tangible consequences. And that is exactly what Jeff Goodell has done in this gripping book.

Of course, heat itself can be misunderstood too - after all, as the author points out, who doesn't dream of lying in the hot sun? But more and more often, this so-called beautiful weather can turn deadly. And Goodell presents us with vivid stories of real people who underestimated the risk of heat and paid the ultimate price. It really makes you think. He also writes about possible strategies and solutions - not to fight global warming, it's too late for that, but to cope with it and make our future more bearable.

Thanks to the publisher, Little, Brown and Company, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

This book is very comprehensive and informative. It not only addresses the causes of global warming but it also presents some of the solutions that are currently being tried (or should be tried). It also presents some really tragic examples of people who have already been killed by the heat, that just keeps rising. Unfortunately, climate change deniers and others who value money over the life of the planet are not going to read this book.

There are some very interesting parts of the book - but there are too many tedious vignettes (the kind you see in long form news articles where they introduce a person, describe their craggy appearance and their favorite dog, Bif, and then go on to describe the problems they're facing), too much about his personal world travel, and endless fear p*rn.

Good parts:
The unique role of sweat production and temperature regulation among humans and the generally underappreciated danger of heat itself in the coming climate catastrophe.

Seriously, though, he almost seems to be bragging about how he went to the Arctic and Antarctic and everywhere else for little to no reason. Um...you ARE the problem?

I think it could have been a good book. If it had kept the good parts, maybe focused more on the solutions being explored (I kept comparing it with "The Big Thirst" by Charles Fishman where I came away impressed that so many smart people are working so hard on solutions to these problems). And downplay his life of exotic travel.

Jeff Goodell’s last book, The Water Will Come, was pretty alarming–but living in the Midwest, it wasn’t personal. The Great Lakes are not going to flood Michigan. But, The Heat Will Kill You First is downright frightening.
Especially this year when Canadian forests are burning. The smoke kept us indoors for the first days of our vacation, masked when outside–while back home, Detroit had the worst air quality in the world.

Is this the future? Uncontrolled burning of the forests, sunlight blocked, the air too polluted to breath? Grey skies that the sun can’t penetrate?

But the real threat of a hotter world is broader and more devastating. And Goodell serves it all up in a book that will raise the hair on your neck better than any suspense thriller you could read.

In the news today we read about temperatures higher than ever recorded. Our bodies, Goodell tells us, were developed for the climate of East Africa: dry and 72 degrees. What happens when our body temperature rises isn’t pretty.

Last May, I experienced early heat stoke while at a local garden center. It was in the 90s outside, the sun relentless outdoors and the greenhouses stuffy and airless. I didn’t feel well. My fitness watch showed my body temperature had risen two degrees! I fled to the air conditioned car, and hubby drove us home, where I cooled in air conditioning with an icy glass of water.

What first world, middle class luxury. Air conditioning.

It is the poor of the world who really suffer, and those who must work outdoors, and even those living in housing built for the moderate climate of the past. And that, my friends, is most of the world.

Climate refugees are already part of dystopian fiction, and will too soon become reality. As will the impact on agriculture resulting in crop loss, the migration of species bringing new diseases North, the destruction of ocean life because of warming waters…

If you aren’t alarmed, you aren’t listening.

And yet….and yet…Goodell holds on to hope that we CAN build a better world. There are people imagining better ways to live and perhaps answers to be discovered.

We are all on this journey together, he ends, humans and animals and plants and trees.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.

I found this book fascinating and it kept me up reading through the night. The author discusses the immediate dangers and multi faceted urgent effects of global warming, especially heat waves on the world’s population. He cites examples of outside workers suffering heat stress and dying from heatstroke because, being I used to such heat, they don’t take precautions or recognize the symptoms.
As new areas warm up disease vectors like mosquitoes and ticks extend their range and spread disease to new areas opening up the potential for new deadly pandemics;
The ice caps of Antarctica and the Arctic Ocean are rapidly melting and the prediction is that the resultant sea level rise will inundate coastal areas and cities such as Miami and New York.
Heat waves accompanied by drought are accompanied by forest fires as we have seen in California, Europe and Canada leaving death and destruction in their wake.
Cities are unprepared, where heat waves are a new phenomenon, such as has happened recently in Paris. Several thousand people died of heat related causes. The old houses with small garrets under super heated tin roofs became super hot death traps . Cities with extensive asphalt and cement and little shade and few trees become unbearably hot. Looking forward cities have to replant with shade trees and paint with light reflecting colors to mitigate the effect of heat.

This book isn’t about a dystopian future. It actually describes the here and now, and it is terrifying. We can all pretend that it’s not getting hotter, drier with more wild fires every year if we live in a clement climate. In other parts of the world, the risk of this and if dying of heat stroke increases.

I don’t want to travel to the Mediterranean in summer anymore, because of heat and fires. Even though I am safe in the Nordics, I often have to go running alone in summer. It gets too hot for the dogs. It’s a sickening privilege.

Powerful stuff.
Terrifying? Indeed.
Depressing? You betcha.
Worth reading (and recommending)? Absolutely.
Will it make a difference? I doubt it, but hope springs eternal.

And yet.... Part of me asks why I bought and read this. OK, it was highly recommended (OK, OK, I read about in the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/bo... ... and almost immediately bought it, and it didn't take long to reach the top of the stack), ... and I can see why it generates so much buzz. But did I learn anything new? Did it persuade me to recommit to a cause I'm already committed to? No, not really.

And I'll be curious to see how often I return to it. I've dog-eared some pages (which I'm entitled to do, because I bought the book, LoL), and, between the index and the notes, I'm confident I'll reach for it doing research or preparing a speech/talk/presentation in the future.

Still, all in all, I'm busy and stressed enough that reading to get more depressed seems like a fool's errand. At the same time, well, it's like watching a horrific accident, and I can't look away, ... while at the same time, I can't understand, for the life of me, how others can. And here, I'm not even talking about the willfully ignorant or the denial community, because that's a horse of a different color.

Then again, I'm obsessed with finding more creative and persuasive and efficient ways to convince others to take climate change seriously, I don't see myself losing interest in the topic any time soon, I'm always looking for books to recommend, particularly to students, and (forgive me for I am weak, but) I enjoy supporting authors doing the difficult and thankless, but critically important work in the field.

So, in the end, no, I have no regrets whatsoever that I bought, read, or am recommending the book.

This was terrifying and left me without much hope for our future.

I think a fair amount about the environment: recycling for more than 50 years, keeping our house set at 60 in the winter, not using air conditioning, walking as much as I can (putting 50k on my 8-year-old car, much of this work-related travel), etc. And, yet, despite being part of the choir, there was a fair amount in Jeff Goodell's The Heat Will Kill You First that I didn't know.

Cool graphic from video of climate changes across time, NASA. Link: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5057

One of the things that I found interesting was how everything is connected. Increases in heat cause greater mortality, especially affecting children and the elderly; more frequent and severe hurricanes; melt of the polar caps, likely leading to low-lying cities and islands to go under water; changes in plants that can grow and thrive under current conditions; polar bear deaths, impacting the numbers of other species; and viruses that have been frozen and quiescent for millennia will be released. People who are financially challenged will be impacted to a greater degree than those who are not.

What can we do? Goodell has many recommendations, but concluded:

Cities need to be denser. Cars need to be replaced with bikes and public transit. New buildings need to be not only efficient and built of sustainable materials, but also safe for people during increasingly intense heat waves. That means more green space, more trees, more water, more shade, more thermally intelligent urban design. (pp. 250-251)

But, this is a more complicated issue for already existing cities that face other kinds of political pressures such as cost and historical designations. How can we make these changes equitable (e.g., planting trees in both wealthy and financially-disadvantaged ones).

And, I wonder whether we should be thinking about getting an air conditioner or a heat pump.

Okay, yeah, I finished this two months or so ago.

I had very high hopes, but I now realize I’m really expecting too much, and was accumulating links to ongoing news to illustrate what I’d expected to be the book’s most important points.

But while the book was good, it didn’t make some very important points:

• Even as the prices of carbon-free energy are plummeting, we are using more dirty energy each year, and the fossil fuel industry is betting very big that’ll continue!

• High-carbon countries (like the U.S. and Europe) aren’t being hit hard (yet) and being inundated with feel-good messaging, while the rest of the world is already suffering —but

• We’re doing so incredibly well at pretending this doom won’t come after us, personally, that we’re moving to and buying property in places

•There are feedback loops within climate change that most folks haven’t spent the energy to learn about. Guess what? There are also feedback loops between climate change and the collapse of democracies that almost no one seems to be studying (here’s a rare counterexample).

I expect to be dead before things get really bad, but I’m pretty sure most of those reading this will have their lives pretty much ruined as civilization comes crashing down, with life expectancy dropping by decades for billions, and not just in poor countries.

 — — — — — — — — —

Here are some of the links I’d accumulated, before I started saving them in an off-line text file…

Not yet finished; accumulating data.
• Taxpayers are subsidizing fossil fuels more than ever — from NY Time's Climate Forward newsletter.

• Can a New Genre of Eco-Thrillers Inspire Climate Action? — from NY Time's Style Magazine (the answer to the title question is: No.)

• Dave's review of Our Final Warning; specifically “Climate denialists will have to move inland just like everyone else that can, but will there be fresh water there?”

• The Economist on El Niño and ENSO. Specifically the Babbage podcast, their briefing article (paywall'd), and their video tutorial.

• From The Guardian: ‘Off-the-charts records’: has humanity finally broken the climate?

• Bloomberg: Exxon Sees CO2 Emissions in 2050 More Than Twice Paris Goal

•Treehugger: Life Cycle Analysis of E-Pickups Shows They're Worse than Small ICE Cars

• See the first chart in this about heat waves: Are heatwaves evidence that climate change is speeding up? All sorts of records are being broken in all sorts of places and contrast with the chart here, about sea ice: Antarctic Sea Ice Is at a ‘Very Concerning’ Record Low

• Why this book is misguided [probably —I haven't read it] and this article is even more true four years after Jonathan Franzen wrote it.

This book is an absolute must read for everyone. Our climate crisis is now. It is happening all around us in small and big ways. Goodell deftly and brilliantly covers all the ways our heating planet is causing deathly problems for the way we live. His writing is extremely accessible and understandable. It is also wide ranging - he covers the class divide in repercussions of rising temps - not everyone can afford air conditioning, and those who can't are left to literally be cooked in their homes. But even ac won't solve for the rich - the grid can only sustain so much and if we're cooling our homes to 72 and it's 120 outside, there will be brownouts and people will die. He also covers the racism of who is affected by heat - discussing back to enslaved people being deemed by Southerners as better able to be in the heat due to their dark skin and how today in our heating world middle and upper class people are sitting pretty inside with air conditioning while we have Latin American workers in the fields and on our roofs working in heat (where we have no OSHA regulations regarding heat) and they are dying. There's coverage of plants and animals and their migration and how they can only adapt so fast. We will have famine. There's also a lovely chapter on mosquitos and how they love heat and they can keep moving further north, with their disease carrying selves, as the world warms and they can kill more of us. It's all a must read. We need to demand changes for how we live and how we use energy now. It's been yet another recordbreaking heat wave summer. And we will not survive this. The time for action is now.

instagram.com/encyclopedia_britanika

The topic is important, so it's good this book is getting attention. But it's not a well written book.

Most of the first few chapters are pretty solid, but it's abundantly clear that about half the page count is just hastily written filler. Lengthy biographies of random side characters, unnecessary descriptions, barely-edited diary entries about his journalistic travels. The author needed to make it book-length to get published, so he did what all lazy college students do: throw random sh*t at the page til you hit the quota.

Maybe read chapters selectively- they're basically stand alone essays anyways. A few are good, but many just aren't worth your time.

[ audio ]

Fascinating. Horrifying.

I live in Maine, US. I often entertain the idea of moving to some other place for a change. I learned about the heatwaves effecting other parts of the country and western Canada, that will likely get worse. I’m no longer entertaining ideas of leaving my lovely pine tree state, at least not permanently. It’s getting warmer and warmer here as it is. We barely had any snow this past winter. Ticks and Lyme disease are going to be far more prevalent. In fact, they’re already out! (It’s March!).

Great narration.

This one was a hard book to rate as I really enjoyed the entire book but one chapter was so intellectually offensive to me that I am forced to take down what I think is a 4-5 star book to 2 stars. However, I really enjoyed this read. There is a lot of science told in a way that cuts through technical jargon making it easier to grasp and understand its implications. The book is about the 2nd and third, 4th etc etc order impacts of extreme heat. How this impacts our ecosystem, the non linearities it causes, how quickly climate is evolving and how organisms built for one climate cannot keep up with the shifting changes in heat. While organisms that thrive in the heat and welcome it are a lot of insects that damage the environment. Creating a cycle of hotter temperatures -> creating insects that destroys trees, crops and vegetation -> Leading to more resources needed to make up for the loss which causes higher energy demands -> which cause higher temperatures from the emissions.

There is a chapter on "Game of function research" (The author does not directly use this term but that is what he is referring to). For those of you who're unfamiliar with this term, GOF is research virologists do to make diseases stronger by running experiments with the DNA. They often times create deadly diseases as a means to understand them at a deeper level. This research was so dangerous that the Obama administration banned it but it was revived by the Trump administration. The logic is this research will help fight against upcoming diseases that spread through the globe like covid-19. This sounds good in theory but think about if this disease actually gets out of the laboratory confinement's. Bingo, we're in conspiracy territory. Any discussion about the lab leak theory in the days of the pandemic were met with account bans on social media. Over time this has been the most plausible cause of the virus and its something that comes with immense taboo to bring up, you can be labeled as anti-vax or anti-science etc. I got vaccinated myself, I have to make these statements so the reader does not automatically think this is some rant by some anti-science nut job.

The author states "Most scientists discredit the lab leak theory", this is simply not true. The former head of the CDC has stated that the virus is most likely man made, the top virologist in the world who were saying publicly that it came from a bat but privately it seems man made in leaked emails. Remember, their entire life's work is in this research so if a global pandemic is brought on by this than it gets impossible to fund their research. We have a literal lab called the "Wuhan Institute of Virology" which has been criticized for not following protocols in the past. The virus emanated from this part of the world and we're suppose to think its a coincidence? The author seems to be getting his information from the very people who have everything to lose if that claim turns out to be true but I also wondered, has the writer taken any grants from any institutions that benefit from the lab leak being discredited? I thought about the gates foundation as a possible donator to this writer and sure enough the writer does interview Gates who is a believer in GOF research. I would be interested to know if this author has accepted any payments from any organization with incentives to GOF research.

I think this is a very important book and its worth the read if you can overlook this one chapter, I still had a lot of fun with this book but I can't overlook that one chapter.

I struggled with a rating for this book and settled on 3.5 stars. There is much information in this book which was fascinating such as the first chapters on how extreme heat affects the body and the risk of spillover zoonotic diseases. However other chapters were incredibly dull, such as the one describing the development and marketing of air conditioners.

Fantastic. Horrifying. I thought I had a good grasp on climate change, but this book documents all the lethal effects of rising temperatures I hadn’t considered. It’s a fast paced book, full of interesting perspectives from different people all impacted by or impacting heat. It’s a stark, honest look at what we’ve done to the world.

Read if you like: not being oblivious to the world around you, personal heartbreaking anecdotes, science, call to actions, quitting your job and going to work to save the planet, air conditioner

An incredible read. The writing is exceptional and the tone just right for such a heavy topic.

Goodell strikes the right balance between technical and scientific information and anecdotal accounts of life on our overheating planet. While the subject matter is grim (you will be shocked and alarmed by the information shared), there is still some hope to find in human innovation, ingenuity, and resilience.

I’d fully recommend this to anyone that wants to learn more about extreme heat! The narrative structure was a good balance of environmental science with human stories to fully demonstrate the impact heat will and already is having. Plus the public health side of it was super well informed, I have several new organizations to look more into!

Another overheated, emotionally driven pop book by an "environmental journalist." Goodell is making a fine living with these ridiculous screeds that pander to current fears. The number of maior forest fires in the U.S. has dropped greatly in the last 100 years when in the past the skies would be dark from huge fires out West, every year! Goodell uses "intimate" and "heartbreaking" personal stories to emotionally supercharge his works. He is not a scientist. He is the equivalent of a dishonest muck racker.
There are much more balanced, sober-minded and ultimately honest books available from Richard Muller and Steven Koonin that are much better and do not fear monger.

"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." Jeff Goodell

If climate change truly is coming, what will be the impacts of increased heat on our planet? What will happen to plants, animals, oceans, and humans? A lot of attention has been paid in recent years to melting glaciers, wildfires, violent storms, and rising tides, but not as much to just plain heat. How hot will it get in the next 20 to 30 years and how will that impact our lives? No one knows for certain, but as the planet heats up we are getting a preview of the effects of heat in certain areas of the planet.

The subject of heat and its consequences are the topic of the sobering new book, The Heat Will Kill You First, by Jeff Goodell. Mr. Goodell is a writer on climate change, having published seven best-selling books on the topic. He traveled to remote corners of the globe, including Antarctica, Alaska, Arizona, Texas, and India to document fascinating stories of survival and death.

I know books about climate change can be a depressingly hard read. Goodell sprinkles his chapters with helpful suggestions, and books like this contribute to the discussion that will continue for the rest of this century. If anything, reading this gives me a much better respect for the dangers of heat. When there is a heat warning, people need to pay attention. He tells the stories of people who discounted the risks of hiking or working during heat waves, with tragic results. Once the outside temperature goes above 95 degrees with the right amount of humidity, the human body relentlessly heats up. Our bodies evolved to only tolerate so much heat for so long, and then we suffer heat exhaustion and eventually heat stroke. Heat can kill you, and the hotter it gets, the riskier it becomes to spend large amounts of time outdoors.

Human beings evolved in temperate savanna's of Africa, and we have a set "Goldilocks zone" of comfortable temperatures between 60 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Anything outside of that zone causes problems. Even small blips of heat in the 80s can cause lethargy, trouble with concentration, sleep problems, and increased violence and irritability. No wonder that riots, crime, and suicides spike during hot summer heat waves.

As the planet heats up, we become more and more dependent upon air conditioning, which tends to favor the rich and leads to poor people having to choose between cooling off or eating. These A/C systems do a wonderful job when they work, but they can be unreliable if the electric grid gets overloaded or people become unable to pay their bills. Will we have to open more cooling centers for ordinary people to ride out the hottest heat waves?

Goodell travels to two large metropolises, Phoenix, Arizona and Chenai, India to show how some of the citizens are coping. Cities are known as heat islands because the materials that make them up, concrete, asphalt and steel retain heat and there is little natural cover to absorb it. Cities are growing rapidly in population, and most have serious infrastructure and income inequality issues. There is much more that can and should be done to make buildings livable. Some areas, like Pakistan and parts of the Middle East are predicted to become unlivable by 2050 for significant periods of time. Where will these people go? Like the animals they will try to migrate to cooler areas and nations need to be prepared for when they do.

This book is an eye opener. Other topics touched upon that are byproducts of increased heat include:

- Massive changes to the world's oceans, including die offs of coral reefs and kelp forests. Major currents may change, and the world's weather is already being affected by how much heat the ocean is absorbing. The global average sea temperature reached a record in 2023 of almost 70 degrees and some areas near Florida topped 100! There was a patch of warm water in the Pacific known as the Blob, a concentration of hot water that is large enough to affect weather patterns in Washington, Oregon, and California.

- People who work outside for a living are facing increased risks to their health. While some employers supply water and cooling breaks, some do not- especially for migrant farm workers. This problem could shut down a lot of activity in the summer from sports to construction to outdoor concerts.

- Dangers from the heat include dangerous pathogens passed along by ticks, mosquitoes, and other vectors that didn't survive in the cooler climates of the past. We don't know the extent of this yet, but the entire ecosystem that we've adapted to over the past few centuries is changing rapidly. The change is much more rapid that evolution could ever adapt to, at least for humans.

Heat waves are becoming so substantial that they are now getting names, just like hurricanes have been getting. In 2023, Europe was hit by Heatwave Cerebus, a system that caused record high temperatures as large as 118 degrees in parts of Europe during July. Named heatwaves promise to get more media attention and cause more precautions. Heat domes can sit atop some areas for weeks, as seen in the Southwest US this past summer.

Most people now recognize that climate change is upon us. Fewer are willing to admit that fossil fuels are the cause and must be replaced, though the science is clear and this book confirms it. Even as we wean ourselves slowly from fossil fuels, heat will continue to be a threat and a killer. Everyone needs to take it seriously, even those protected indoors with cozy air conditioning. 90% of US citizens have access to air conditioning, while only 5% of India citizens do. The countries that contribute the most to carbon pollution are also the ones the most shielded from its effects. This imbalance causes problems getting things done, but you can't keep throwing money at heat. It needs to be dealt with now as a public health problem, and in the future as a true threat to survival for billions.

So instead of getting depressed by yet another grim climate change book, I felt energized and enlightened. There are solutions out there, and there is suffering that can be eased or prevented. Somehow we must pull together to figure it all out.

Goodell starts with a typical weekend day in the life of a California family, Jonathan Gerrish, Ellen Chung, their infant daughter Miju, and their fluffy dog Oski, taking an early morning summer hike near their home. In a matter of hours, all four are dead, killed by murderous heat, and later their ashes are all buried together.

This is a terrifying book. Heat is a killer, and extreme heat is spreading like wildfire (another thing heat entails) as the planet inexorably warms. Goodell ably combines his own experiences with the science, making this a must-read.

The trouble is, the people who need to read it will not, and they will vote in more right wingers who are untroubled to see the hoi polloi bake. Are we doomed? Likely. I increasingly see no escape.

Fast engaging read. Even though the content was heavy, the science factoids made it fun. The only real drawbacks come towards the end where, instead of talking about the "haves" making consumption changes or the possibility of pursuing de-growth political strategies, he has a chapter on a financier running a foundation focused on marketing the dangers of heat (the author is on the board) and another chapter on a friend running a carbon offset scam, I mean scheme, as well as promoting crackpot cloud seeding ideas. That plus occasionally mentioning over-population but not talking about Malthusianism makes me wish he'd stuck to the fun science factoids throughout.

This book is amazing. It’s harrowing but a must read!

Amazing book. Recommend to everyone who said “it’s just so hot outside” this summer.

Main takeaways just so I don’t forget: Paraphrasing, but once you realize how violent and slow it is to die of heat, you realize how preventable heat deaths are. The heat symptoms you think you’re fighting off because you think you’re fit and healthy are the very warning signs meant to help you; heat exhaustion is not only for the young, sick, and elderly. And, air conditioning will not save us.