The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
by Jeff Goodell
View on GoodreadsClimate journalist Jeff Goodell's argument that heat — not sea-level rise or storms — is the most underappreciated immediate climate threat, and that the physiological and infrastructural systems we depend on are inadequate to what's coming.
Core ideas
- Human thermoregulation has hard biological limits — wet-bulb temperatures around 35°C are uniformly lethal regardless of fitness or hydration — and those limits are now being crossed in inhabited regions.
- The infrastructure dependence is the underdiscussed half: cities, food systems, electrical grids, and supply chains were designed for a thermal regime we're already outside, and retrofitting is slow where it's happening at all.
- The mortality is already substantial and concentrated among the elderly, poor, and outdoor laborers — heat deaths are systematically undercounted because the cause-of-death system attributes them to underlying conditions.
Published2023
Pages400
ISBN9780316497572
ReadOct 2024
