01

02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
PROLOGU E: T H E G OL DI LOC K S 10
ZON E 11
12
13
14
15
16
When heat comes, it’s invisible. It doesn’t bend tree branches 17
or blow hair across your face to let you know it’s arrived. The 18
ground doesn’t shake. It just surrounds you and works on you 19
in ways that you can’t anticipate or control. You sweat. Your 20
heart races. You’re thirsty. Your vision blurs. The sun feels 21
like the barrel of a gun pointed at you. Plants look like they’re 22
crying. Birds vanish from the sky and take refuge in deep 23
shade. Cars are untouchable. Colors fade. The air smells 24
burned. You can imagine fire even before you see it. 25
In the summer of 2021, weathercasters in the Pacific 26
Northwest warned people that a heat wave was on the way. 27
Workers in Washington’s Yakima Valley were summoned to 28
cherry orchards at 1 a.m. so the ripe fruit could be picked 29
before it turned to mush. Air-​conditioning contractors were 30
deluged with calls. Electric fans sold out at Home Depot and S31
Lowe’s. The Red Cross activated its heat alert network, N32

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 T H E H E AT W I L L K I L L Y O U F I R S T

01 blasting out warnings to people to drink water and check on

02 family and friends who lived alone. Libraries and churches
03 set up cooling centers for the homeless or anyone who needed
04 refuge. In Portland, Chris Voss, the emergency management
05 director for Multnomah County, decided to open the Oregon
06 Convention Center, which was capable of providing a cool
07 retreat for hundreds of people. “What’s coming is not just
08 uncomfortable heat,” Jennifer Vines, the lead health officer
09 for the region, advised Voss. “This is life-​threatening heat.”
10 Nevertheless, the heat hit with a force that few people
11 anticipated. The Pacific Northwest, after all, has long been
12 seen as a climate refuge. It was the place you moved to if you
13 wanted to live somewhere that was “safe” from climate
14 change. There are beaches and lakes and stately trees and
15 volcanic soil where anything grows, from blueberries to box‑
16 wood to grapes that are crushed into world-​class Pinot Noir.
17 There are glaciers in the Cascades and lush temperate rain
18 forests in Olympic National Park and more than a few frag‑
19 ments left of the Edenic paradise that pulled so many settlers
20 over the Oregon Trail. In the 1970s, Steve Jobs picked apples
21 on a farm in the region and loved it so much he named a
22 computer company after it. Heat wave? No big deal. This was
23 not Phoenix, where heat owns the city. Or New Delhi, where
24 heat is both a goddess and a demon. In the Pacific Northwest
25 that summer, everyone might have known the heat was com‑
26 ing, but nobody thought it would be a searing, ghostly force
27 that would melt asphalt and kill loved ones and force a new
28 reckoning with the world they live in.
29 The heat wave had been born over the Pacific a week or
30 so earlier. Atmospheric waves wobbled across the Northern
31S Hemisphere, creating a high-​pressure lid that allowed heat
32N radiating up from the ocean to gather beneath it. As this pile

HeatWillKillYo_HCtext1P.indd 6 2/14/23 1:16:13 AM
 T he G oldilocks Z one

of heat drifted to the coast, it grew quickly in size and inten‑ 01

sity (land reflects and amplifies heat much more efficiently 02
than water), creating what scientists called a heat dome. In a 03
twenty-​four-​hour period, the temperature in downtown Port‑ 04
land jumped from 76 degrees to 114 degrees, the hottest tem‑ 05
perature in 147 years of observations.1 Suddenly, the ferny 06
­salamander-​land of the Northwest felt like the hard-​baked 07
steel and sand of Dubai. 08
Ice, nature’s most exquisite thermometer, registered the 09
heat first. The last of the winter snow in the Cascades van‑ 10
ished from shady hollows in the forests and atop the glaciers 11
near the peaks. With the protective snowpack gone, the blue 12
glacial ice itself began to melt, rushing down streambeds and 13
canyons in a swirl of silty gray water, carrying ancient sedi‑ 14
ment from before the fossil fuel age, before books, before 15
the pyramids. The rush of meltwater flooded roads and 16
towns as it rolled down to the rivers and out to the sea. In the 17
Columbia River, which is the largest river in the Northwest, 18
crisscrossing seven states and covering over 250,000 square 19
miles, the wash of sediment was so enormous that satellites 20
circling the Earth photographed a gray plume flowing sev‑ 21
eral miles into the Pacific. 22
In streams and rivers, migrating salmon immediately 23
sensed the changes in water temperature. They had spent 24
three or four years in the cold, salty Pacific and now were 25
swimming upstream in freshwater back to where they were 26
born to lay eggs and begin the cycle anew. The salmon’s jour‑ 27
ney is one of the great wonders of nature. But it is also a frag‑ 28
ile one. Warm runoff in the rivers — ​shallow water can heat 29
30
1
Unless otherwise noted, all temperature references in this book are in
S31
Fahrenheit. N32

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 T H E H E AT W I L L K I L L Y O U F I R S T

01 up quickly as it flows down out of the mountains — ​made it

02 difficult for the struggling salmon to breathe (the warmer
03 the water, the faster oxygen molecules vibrate with kinetic
04 energy, allowing them to flee their molecular bonds and
05 escape into the air. “It leaves fish feeling like they are breath‑
06 ing with a plastic bag over their heads,” one wildlife biologist
07 told me). Their iridescent silvery skin broke out in red lesions.
08 Cottony puffs of fungus grew on their backs. Some escaped
09 to cooler tributaries. But tens of thousands of others, exhausted
10 and suffocating and literally disintegrating in the warmth,
11 became meals for other fish or washed up on the riverbanks,
12 where they were picked apart by racoons and eagles.
13 In the mountains and valleys, every plant and tree was
14 assaulted by the heat, rooted in place and unable to move,
15 creators of shade that were themselves unable to seek refuge.
16 As the temperature rose, they struggled with the heat just as
17 humans do, trying to preserve water while the sun and the
18 heat sucked it out of the soil and the flesh of their leaves and
19 trunks. All across the Pacific Northwest there was a great
20 clenching as the plants closed the pores on the undersides of
21 their leaves, in effect holding their breath, hoping the heat
22 would pass quickly. Blackberry and blueberry plants drank
23 the moisture out of their own fruit, leaving it dry and with‑
24 ered on the stalk. On broadleaf trees like ash and maple,
25 leaves brittled and curled. As temperatures rose, some of the
26 most sun-​exposed trees opened their pores, desperately try‑
27 ing to cool off by sweating. Their roots worked to pull water
28 out of the dry soil, but instead sucked air bubbles into the
29 veins that ran up their trunks, causing them to rupture. If
30 you’d had the right kind of microphone, scientists say, you
31S could have heard the trees screaming.
32N In the mountains, bighorn sheep headed for higher

HeatWillKillYo_HCtext1P.indd 8 2/14/23 1:16:13 AM
 T he G oldilocks Z one

elevations. Doves rested on shady branches and opened their 01

wings to aerate their bodies. And like dogs, they panted. 02
Baby hawks, hot and fuzzy in their nests, faced the choice of 03
overheating with their siblings or jumping out before they 04
were ready to fly. Many jumped. Dozens of fluttering, broken 05
bodies were found by hikers and taken to wildlife rehabilita‑ 06
tion centers. 07
For some animals, however, these were good times. Cat‑ 08
erpillars basked in the heat to kill pathogens in their bodies. 09
Maggots hatched in the mouths of the dead salmon on the 10
riverbanks. For pine bark beetles, an invasive species that is 11
decimating western forests, the heat was like guzzling Red 12
Bull. Their metabolism revved up, their appetite grew, and 13
they moved like a marauding army through thousand-​acre 14
stands of Jeffrey pines. 15
In the cities and suburbs, air-​conditioning units whirred. 16
Overloaded power lines hummed and sagged. In the grid 17
control centers, dispatchers sent urgent messages to power 18
companies, who fired up idle natural gas plants, which can 19
quickly generate electricity (and profits) during desperate 20
times. In Oregon’s Multnomah County, outdoor sporting 21
events and concerts were canceled. Volunteers made thou‑ 22
sands of calls to check in on disabled people and senior citi‑ 23
zens. In Vancouver, British Columbia, police answered a 24
surge of calls from people with difficulty breathing or in car‑ 25
diac arrest. Sirens wailed and hospital emergency rooms 26
were crowded with panting, red-​faced people. Desperate to 27
lower their body temperatures as quickly as possible, doctors 28
filled body bags with ice and zipped them inside. 29
Vivek Shandas, a professor of urban studies and planning 30
at Portland State University, drove around in his Prius with S31
his eleven-​year-​old son, Suhail, measuring the temperature in N32

HeatWillKillYo_HCtext1P.indd 9 2/14/23 1:16:13 AM
 T H E H E AT W I L L K I L L Y O U F I R S T

01 different parts of the city. In Lents, one of Portland’s poorest

02 neighborhoods, where trees are few and concrete is plentiful,
03 Shandas measured an air temperature of 124 degrees, the
04 highest temperature he had ever recorded in fifteen years of
05 chronicling heat. “When I stopped and opened my car door,
06 the first thing I felt was my eyes burning,” Shandas recalled.
07 “My skin was on fire. It just feels like you’re melting.” He drove
08 to Willamette Heights, a tree-​lined suburb with parks and lots
09 of greenery where the median house price is about $1 mil‑
10 lion. He measured the air temperature again: 99 degrees. In
11 a heat wave, wealth can afford twenty-​ five degrees of
12 coolness.
13
14 Nobody knows for sure how many people died during the
15 seventy-​t wo hours of extreme heat in the Pacific Northwest.
16 The official count was 1,000, but heat is a subtle killer and
17 doesn’t always make it onto death certificates. The actual
18 number is likely far higher. Whatever the true toll was, it cer‑
19 tainly included Rosemary Anderson, sixty-​seven, whose neigh‑
20 bor had texted her, “Good night, sleep tight, may you find
21 lots of angel wings upon your pillow,” the night before she
22 was found dead in her house, where the indoor temperature
23 measured 99.5 degrees. It also included Jollene Brown, sixty-​
24 three, who lived alone in an apartment a few miles away from
25 Anderson, who was found by her son Shane sitting in her
26 La‑Z‑Boy rocker with one foot on the footrest, one foot on
27 the floor, as if she’d been about to stand up but couldn’t
28 because of the wall of heat in her tiny un‑air-​conditioned liv‑
29 ing room. As with most heat waves today, the people who
30 died first were elderly folks who lived alone, or who were too
31S poor to afford air-​conditioning, or who had a medical prob‑
32N lem that left them vulnerable. In this sense, a heat wave is a

10

HeatWillKillYo_HCtext1P.indd 10 2/14/23  1:16:13 AM

 T he G oldilocks Z one

predatory event, one that culls out the most vulnerable peo‑ 01
ple. But that will change. As heat waves become more intense 02
and more common, they will become more democratic. 03
Even before this heat wave hit the Pacific Northwest, the 04
forests were burning, dried to tinder by years of rising heat 05
and declining rainfall. But in British Columbia, the heat 06
brought something like spontaneous combustion to Lytton, 07
an old mining camp (pop. 250) at the confluence of the Fra‑ 08
ser and Thompson Rivers where First Nations people have 09
lived for thousands of years. In the 1970s, the town was 10
reborn as a whitewater rafting mecca due to its proximity to 11
the spectacular flow of water through the black granite walls 12
of Thompson Canyon. On the third day of the heat wave, 13
temperatures in Lytton reached an unholy 121 degrees. 14
Lorna Fandrich remembers looking out the window at the 15
Chinese history museum in town — ​an institution she and 16
her husband founded to commemorate and honor the Chi‑ 17
nese workers who built the railroad and worked in the min‑ 18
ing camps — ​and seeing leaves dropping off a tree, as if it 19
were an autumn day, though it was only June. “I thought, 20
How strange,” she said later. Then wind kicked up and a spark 21
jumped out from the steel wheel of a passing freight train. 22
Within minutes, the town was aflame. Mayor Jan Polderman 23
raced his Honda minivan through the village, begging skep‑ 24
tical residents to flee. He picked up one of the last stragglers, 25
a man running down a road with his cat in a cage. 26
Jeff Chapman, who lived with his parents outside of town, 27
was just starting to cook dinner when he saw the smoke and 28
fire approaching. “Ten minutes later, our house was fully 29
engulfed,” he said. “There was nothing we could do. We had 30
nowhere to go.” As the blaze swallowed the house and the S31
trees around it, Chapman rushed his parents, who were both N32

11

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 T H E H E AT W I L L K I L L Y O U F I R S T

01 in their sixties, into a trench that had been dug a few days
02 earlier to repair a septic system. It wasn’t big enough for all
03 three of them, so he grabbed a sheet of metal roofing nearby
04 and laid it over them. Then he took refuge on some nearby
05 railroad tracks, hoping the fire would pass.
06 That’s when the power line crashed down across the
07 trench where his parents were sheltering. “I knew my parents
08 were in that hole and I’m watching the house burn and I’m
09 thinking, Oh my God.” Chapman survived the inferno. His
10 parents did not.
11 A few days later, as if by some miracle, it was blue skies
12 and cool weather again in Lytton. The entire town was smol‑
13 dering, burned to the ground. A few pieces of porcelain pot‑
14 tery survived in the ashes of the Chinese history museum.
15 Douglas fir trees on the edge of town looked like black
16 spears. There were grief and horror about what had hap‑
17 pened, and vows to rebuild. Meanwhile, out on the coast,
18 limp starfish and the shells of mussels and clams washed
19 ashore by the millions. Chris Harley, a zoologist at the Uni‑
20 versity of British Columbia, estimated that the three-​day heat
21 wave killed more than a billion sea creatures.
22 But as June came and went and summer turned to fall,
23 life went back to normal, and the memory of the heat wave
24 faded, as memories of heat waves always do, until they
25 become like the fleeting images of a nightmare you’re not
26 quite sure you had. Or a future you don’t want to imagine.
27
28 You probably think of heat on a temperature scale, either
29 Fahrenheit or Celsius. You think of it as a gradual, linear
30 thing, a quality of the air around you that moves up and
31S down in increments, or that can be controlled by a thermo‑
32N stat. Seventy degrees is a little hotter than 68 degrees, which

12

HeatWillKillYo_HCtext1P.indd 12 2/14/23  1:16:13 AM

 T he G oldilocks Z one

is a little hotter than 65 degrees. The change of seasons also 01

plays into this incremental perception of heat — ​w inter grad‑ 02
ually warms into spring, spring into summer. Yes, there are 03
some days that are noticeably hotter or colder than others, 04
but we crank up the air-​conditioning or throw on a sweater. 05
We trust it will pass and things will return to normal. Tem‑ 06
perature is a merry‑go‑round that we are used to riding. 07
This sense of incrementalism also holds true with the cli‑ 08
mate crisis. The Earth is getting hotter due to the burning of 09
fossil fuels. This is a simple truth, as clear as the moon in the 10
night sky. So far, thanks to 250 years of hell-​bent fuel con‑ 11
sumption, which has filled the atmosphere with heat-​trapping 12
carbon dioxide (CO2), global temperatures have risen by 2.2 13
degrees since the preindustrial era and are on track to warm 14
by 6 degrees or more by the end of the century. The more oil, 15
gas, and coal we burn, the hotter it will get. 16
Right now we’re more than halfway to 3.6 degrees (2 17
degrees Celsius) of warming from preindustrial tempera‑ 18
tures, which scientists have long warned is the threshold for 19
dangerous climate change. The reports of the UN’s Intergov‑ 20
ernmental Panel on Climate Change are full of harrowing 21
details of what might happen to our world with 3.6 degrees of 22
warming, from collapsing ice sheets to crop-​killing drought. 23
But to nonscientists — ​which is to say, most humans on the 24
planet — ​3.6 degrees of warming does not sound dangerous 25
at all. Who can tell the difference between a 77‑degree day 26
and an 81‑degree day? Then there are social media trolls 27
who argue that extreme cold kills people and causes all kinds 28
of weather-​related problems too so maybe a hotter world isn’t 29
such a bad thing after all. Even the phrase “global warming” 30
sounds gentle and soothing, as if the most notable impact of S31
burning fossil fuels will be better beach weather. N32

13

HeatWillKillYo_HCtext1P.indd 13 2/14/23  1:16:13 AM

 T H E H E AT W I L L K I L L Y O U F I R S T

01 The difficulty of understanding the consequences of

02 heat is amplified by conventional notions of what it means to
03 be hot. In pop culture, hot is sexy. Hot is cool. Hot is new.
04 Websites publish “hot lists” of the latest books, movies, TV
05 shows, and actors. Facebook started in Mark Zuckerberg’s
06 Harvard dorm as a hot‑or‑not website called Facemash,
07 which ranked the attractiveness of Harvard women. Heat is
08 an expression of passion — ​you feel hot for the guy at the bar
09 or engage him in a heated debate. A person who is quick to
10 anger is hot-​blooded. Near the house where I live in Austin is
11 a gym called Heat Bootcamp. Here, sweat is purifying, a sign
12 of inner strength (a throwback to medieval times, perhaps,
13 when heat was linked to masculinity through what philoso‑
14 pher Thomas Aquinas called “the elemental heat of the
15 semen”) . In Miami, one of the hottest cities in the US, where
16 heat is a lethal threat to outdoor workers and where the city
17 regularly floods due to rising seas caused by the melting ice
18 sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, the basketball team is
19 named, without irony, the Miami Heat.
20
21 In this book, my goal is to convince you to think about heat
22 in a different way. The kind of heat I’m talking about here is
23 not an incremental bump on the thermometer or the slow
24 slide of spring into summer. It is heat as an active force, one
25 that can bend railroad tracks and kill you before you even
26 understand that your life is at risk. Scientists don’t fully
27 understand how fast this heat can move or where it will
28 appear next (until it happened, a killer heat wave in the
29 Pacific Northwest seemed about as likely as snow in the
30 Sahara). But there is one thing scientists do know: this is a
31S form of heat that has been unleashed upon us through the
32N

14

HeatWillKillYo_HCtext1P.indd 14 2/14/23  1:16:13 AM

 T he G oldilocks Z one

burning of fossil fuels. In this sense, extreme heat is an 01

entirely human artifact, a legacy of human civilization as 02
real as the Great Wall of China. 03
The amount of heat generated by our consumption of 04
fossil fuels is difficult to grasp: by one measure, the ocean 05
absorbs the equivalent of the heat released from three 06
nuclear bombs every second. And because CO2 stays in the 07
atmosphere for thousands of years, it’s not going to cool off 08
when we finally stop emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. All 09
that will do is stop the increase in warming. It will not reverse 10
it. Until we figure out a way to suck massive amounts of CO2 11
out of the sky, we will be stuck with a hotter planet. 12
This heat we are pumping into the sky is the prime mover 13
of the climate crisis. The climate impacts you hear about 14
most often, from sea-​level rise to drought to wildfires, are all 15
second-​order effects of a hotter planet. The first-​order effect 16
is heat. It is the engine of planetary chaos, the invisible 17
force  that melts the ice sheets that will flood coastal cities 18
around the world. It dries out the soil and sucks the moisture 19
out of trees until they are ready to ignite. It revs up the bugs 20
that eat the crops and thaws the permafrost that contains 21
bacteria from the last ice age. When the next pandemic hits, 22
the chances are good it will be caused by a virus that leapt 23
from an animal that was seeking out a cooler place to live. 24
As a force, heat is mysterious because its effects are both 25
slow and fast. Think of parched wheatfields, slowly dried out 26
by months of heat that pulls moisture out of the ground and 27
spits it into the sky. Then think of heat waves that are the cos‑ 28
mic equivalent of a bug zapper that kills you before you 29
understand what’s happening. Extreme heat penetrates 30
every living cell and melts them like a Popsicle on a summer S31
N32

15

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 T H E H E AT W I L L K I L L Y O U F I R S T

01 sidewalk. It reverses evolution, driving entropy and disorder.

02 It is the widening gyre that the poet W. B. Yeats wrote about2,
03 an extinction force that takes the universe back to its messy
04 beginnings. Before there was light, there was heat. It is the
05 origin of all things and the end of all things.
06
07 You don’t need to be a Hollywood screenwriter to imagine
08 how our world will be changed by extreme heat. A few things
09 are ­self-​evident.
10 As the temperature rises, it will drive a great migration — ​
11 of humans, of animals, of plants, of jobs, of wealth, of diseases.
12 They will all seek out cooler ecological niches where they can
13 thrive. Some will fare better than others. Robins can migrate
14 more easily than elephants. Poison ivy can move more quickly
15 than an oak tree. Farmers who grow wheat have more options
16 than farmers who grow peaches. And some creatures have
17 nowhere to go. Polar bears in the Arctic can’t migrate farther
18 north. Frogs in Costa Rica aren’t going to hop up to Canada.
19 Humans are better off than many plants and animals.
20 With the help of technology, we can adjust to a lot of things.
21 As one architect told me, “If you have enough money, you can
22 engineer your way out of anything.” And in some ways, he’s
23 right. If we can send photos through the air and drive a rover
24 around on Mars, we can design new ways to live in hot places.
25 You can see it happening right now in Paris and Los Angeles
26 and many other cities around the world, where shade trees
27 are being planted and streets painted white to deflect sun‑
28 light. Plant geneticists are developing new strains of corn and
29
30 2
The opening lines of Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” written in 1919, soon
after the end of World War I: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/
31S The falcon cannot hear the falconer/Things fall apart; the centre cannot
32N hold”

16

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 T he G oldilocks Z one

wheat and soybeans that can better tolerate high tempera‑ 01

tures. Air-​conditioning is becoming cheaper and more widely 02
used. Communication from public health officials about how 03
to protect yourself during a heat wave is improving. Clothing 04
companies are developing new high-​tech fabrics to reflect 05
away sunlight and dissipate heat more quickly. 06
But even for the wealthy and privileged, adaptation to 07
extreme heat has its limits. And the notion that eight billion 08
people are going to thrive on a hotter planet by simply crank‑ 09
ing up the air-​conditioning or seeking refuge under a pine 10
tree is a profound misunderstanding of the future we are 11
creating for ourselves. In western Pakistan, where only the 12
richest of the rich have air-​conditioning, it’s already too hot 13
for humans several weeks a year. Planting a few thousand 14
trees is not going to save them. In India, I talked with fami‑ 15
lies who live in concrete slums that are so hot they burn their 16
hands opening doors. Holy cities like Mecca and Jerusalem, 17
where millions gather on religious pilgrimages, are caldrons 18
of sweat. In the summer of 2022, nine hundred million peo‑ 19
ple in China — ​63 percent of the nation’s population — ​suf‑ 20
fered under a two-​month-​long extreme heat wave that killed 21
crops and sparked wildfires. “There is nothing in world cli‑ 22
matic history which is even minimally comparable to what is 23
happening in China,” one weather historian declared. 24
In a world of heat-​driven chaos, heat exposes deep fissures 25
of inequity and injustice. Poverty equals vulnerability. If you 26
have money, you can turn up the air-​conditioning, stock up 27
on food and bottled water, and install a backup generator in 28
case there’s a blackout. If things get bad enough, you can sell 29
your house and move to a cooler place. If you’re poor, on the 30
other hand, you swelter in an uninsulated apartment or S31
trailer with no air-​conditioning or an old, inefficient machine N32

17

HeatWillKillYo_HCtext1P.indd 17 2/14/23  1:16:13 AM

 T H E H E AT W I L L K I L L Y O U F I R S T

01 that you can’t afford to run. You can’t move somewhere

02 cooler because you’re afraid of losing your job and you don’t
03 have the savings to start over. “We’re all in the storm, but
04 we’re not in the same boat,” Heather McTeer Toney, the for‑
05 mer mayor of Greenville, Mississippi, said during testimony
06 before the US Congress. “Some of us are sitting on aircraft
07 carriers while others are just bobbing along on a floatie.”
08 Solomon Hsiang, an economist and climate scientist at
09 the University of California, Berkeley, and the codirector of
10 the research group Climate Impact Lab, calculates that each
11 degree Celsius of warming will erase 1.2 percent of America’s
12 GDP per year, or about $300 billion. Heat lowers children’s
13 test scores and raises the risk of miscarriage in pregnant
14 women. Prolonged exposure increases death rates from heart
15 and kidney disease. When people are stressed by heat, they
16 are more impulsive and prone to conflict. Racial slurs and
17 hate speech in social media spike. Suicides rise. Gun violence
18 increases. There are more rapes and more violent crime. In
19 Africa and the Middle East, studies have found a link between
20 higher temperatures and the outbreak of civil war.
21 The harshest truth about life on a superheated planet is
22 this: as temperatures rise, a lot of living things will die, and that
23 may include people you know and love. A study in The Lancet, a
24 prestigious medical journal, estimated that 489,000 people
25 worldwide died from extreme heat in 2019. That’s far more
26 than all other natural disasters combined, including hurri‑
27 canes and wildfires. It is also more than the number of deaths
28 from guns or illegal drugs. And those are only the deaths that
29 are directly attributable to heat. There are also deaths caused
30 by the heat-​related amplification of ground-​level ozone pollu‑
31S tion (aka smog), or the smoke from wildfires in desiccated for‑
32N ests. The smoke can drift thousands of miles, lofting tiny

18

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 T he G oldilocks Z one

particulates into the atmosphere. When you inhale them, they 01

can trigger a variety of health problems, from asthma to heart 02
attacks. The toll is enormous: globally, between 260,000 and 03
600,000 people die each year inhaling smoke from wildfires. 04
Smoke pollution doesn’t only kill people near fires either. Wild‑ 05
fires in western Canada have been directly linked to spikes in 06
hospitalizations three thousand miles away on the East Coast 07
of the US. 08
09
Earth’s history is full of wild temperature swings, driven by 10
volcanic eruptions, meteor strikes, and geologic mayhem. 11
There have been palm trees in the Arctic and two thousand 12
feet of ice over New York City. But for the last three million 13
years or so, while humans evolved, the climate has been rela‑ 14
tively stable. Stable enough, anyway, that our ancestors could 15
migrate, adapt, and thrive. 16
But those days may be over. The last time the Earth was hot‑ 17
ter than it is today was at least 125,000 years ago, long before 18
anything that resembled human civilization appeared. Since 19
1970, the Earth’s temperature has spiked faster than in any 20
comparable forty-​year period in recorded history. The eight 21
years between 2015 and 2022 were the hottest on record. In 22
2022, 850 million people lived in regions that experienced all-​ 23
time high temperatures. Globally, killer heat waves are becom‑ 24
ing longer, hotter, and more frequent. One recent study found 25
that a heat wave like the one that cooked the Pacific Northwest 26
is 150 times more likely today than it was before we began the 27
atmosphere with CO2 at the beginning of the industrial age. 28
The ocean, which hundreds of millions of people depend on 29
for their food supply and which has a big influence on weather, 30
was the hottest ever recorded in 2022. Even Antarctica, the cold‑ S31
est place on Earth, is not immune. In March of 2022, a heat N32

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 T H E H E AT W I L L K I L L Y O U F I R S T

01 wave invaded the ice-​bound continent, pushing temperatures

02 seventy degrees — ​seventy degrees! — ​above normal.
03 Extreme heat is remaking our planet into one in which
04 large swaths may become inhospitable to human life. One
05 recent study projected that over the next fifty years, one to
06 three billion people will be left outside the climate condi‑
07 tions that gave rise to civilization over the last six thousand
08 years. Even if we transition fairly quickly to clean energy, half
09 of the world’s human population will be exposed to life-​
10 threatening combinations of heat and humidity by 2100.
11 Temperatures in parts of the world could rise so high that
12 just stepping outside for a few hours, another study warned,
13 “will result in death even for the fittest of humans.”
14 Life on Earth is like a finely calibrated machine, one that
15 has been built by evolution to work very well within its design
16 parameters. Heat breaks that machine in a fundamental way,
17 disrupting how cells function, how proteins unfold, how mol‑
18 ecules move. Yes, some organisms can thrive in higher tem‑
19 peratures than others. Roadrunners do better than blue jays.
20 Silver Saharan ants can run across superhot desert sands
21 that would kill other insects instantly. Microbes live in 170-​
22 degree hot springs in Yellowstone National Park. A thirty-​
23 year-​old triathlete can handle a 110-​degree day better than a
24 seventy-​year-​old man with heart disease. And yes, we humans
25 are remarkable creatures with a tremendous capacity to
26 adapt and adjust to a rapidly changing world.
27 But extreme heat is a force beyond anything we have
28 reckoned with before. It may be a human creation, but it is
29 godlike in its power and prophecy. Because all living things
30 share one simple fate: if the temperature they’re used to — ​
31S what scientists sometimes call their Goldilocks Zone — ​rises
32N too far, too fast, they die.

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