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My name is Jeff Goodell. I’m a climate journalist, and I’m the author most recently of a “New York Times” bestseller called “The Heat Will Kill You First, Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.”
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I’ve been writing about climate change for more than 20 years. And it wasn’t until 2018 — I can tell you exactly the moment — when I was in Phoenix doing some reporting for an entirely different story. It was 115 degrees out, and I was late for a meeting downtown. And I called an Uber. My Uber was late also.
So I decided, to heck with it. I’m going to run/walk to my meeting. And I went 15 blocks, and by the time I got 15 blocks in my run/walk, my heart was pounding. I was dizzy, I was lightheaded. And I thought, oh, my god, this heat is brutal. This could kill me if I had to go much farther.
And that was the first time, despite the fact that I had been a journalist covering climate change for a very long time, that I really realized what a dangerous force heat can be and how it can kill you like a bug zapper in the wrong kinds of conditions.
And I think it reflects a deeper misunderstanding about the risks of heat, unlike, say, a hurricane or sea level rise or other climate impacts, which are very visual. A wildfire — you look out the window, your trees are burning, you know you’re in trouble.
You look out the window on a hot day in Houston or in Miami or in Phoenix, and you can’t tell, looking out the window, if it’s 75 degrees or 125 degrees. There’s no visual indication of that. So it plays tricks with our minds in the sense of we don’t recognize the threat until our heart is pounding through our chest, and we’re already in trouble.
So we basically have one mechanism to release heat from our body, and that is sweating. So what happens when our bodies start to overheat is, our hearts start pounding faster and faster, trying to push the blood out towards our skin, where it can be cooled by the evaporation of sweat.
So as the temperature rises, our hearts start pounding harder and harder. If the temperatures rise high enough, if your body temperature rises high enough, it can’t cool off with that sweat. Then, essentially, the cells in our body start unraveling. And that’s really what an extreme heat stroke is.
Last year, a team of researchers wrote a pretty influential paper looking at what would happen if they had the combining events of a heat wave and a blackout. They looked at Atlanta, they looked at Phoenix, and they looked at Detroit. They modeled a five-day blackout. And over that five-day period, they found that in Phoenix, there would be as many as 800,000 emergency room visits in the city.
And they estimated a death toll of above 13,000 people, which is far, far higher than what they found in either Atlanta or Detroit. And the explanation for that is twofold. One is that Phoenix temperatures are higher. So that means the risk is higher, just because of that, but also because of the high penetration of air conditioning. When the power does go out, people are then much more vulnerable.
We build buildings now that are built around the idea of air conditioning. They only function if the air conditioning is working. And if the air conditioning goes out for whatever reason, then they become essentially convection ovens. I grew up in Silicon Valley. I worked at Apple computer in the early days, back when Steve Jobs was running around barefoot and shouting Bob Dylan lyrics at everybody.
And I believe in technology as a tool to solve our problems. And I think it’s really important in all kinds of ways to deploy better technology. But in this case, with air conditioning and heat and the risks of blackouts, I think that technology gives us a false sense of security. And so we are building a world that has this sort of Damocles hanging over us.
There’s a lot to be done to reduce the risks of extreme heat. So the first thing that needs to be done is to make the grid more resilient, because the whole question of risk is about the consequences of a blackout during extreme heat.
Number two is stopping the rise of temperatures. Let’s be very clear. These extreme heat events are a consequence of climate change. And climate change is a consequence of putting more CO2 into the atmosphere. So we need to stop doing that.
Then there’s a whole suite of other things that need to be done, which have to do with making our cities more livable in hot conditions. There’s something called the urban heat island effect. Cities are built of concrete and asphalt that heats up like a hot rock does in a fire. So we need to build cities that are less hot, and that means more shade, more parks, more green spaces, more water, more access to nature, in a way, and less of just pavements and strip malls.
Last year was the hottest year ever recorded by humans. We’re in this new climate era now. And so I think that in that sense, the heat waves that we’ve been seeing and the summer that we’re looking forward to is a kind of harbinger of what’s to come.
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