The Paris Climate Accords, an international treaty on global climate change, involves nearly all the nations of the world. The agreement established goals to limit the emission of greenhouse gases in order to limit the rate at which the earth is warming. Wealthier countries who have been the largest emitters of greenhouse gases agreed to finance the effort. The parties to the agreement originally represented 98 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions.*
This agreement was widely viewed as the most significant effort to address the challenges of our rapidly changing planet. After decades of political and economic controversy over climate change, it appeared that the world had finally come to its senses and overwhelmingly silenced those who claimed that anthropogenic global warming was some elaborate hoax. After decades of political and economic maneuvering, science had finally prevailed.
The Paris Climate Accords went into effect on November 4, 2016. Four days later Donald Trump was elected the forty-fifth president of the United States.
At the earliest possible date permitted by the treaty, November 4, 2019, the United States, second only to China in its production of greenhouse gases, withdrew from the treaty. On Joe Biden’s first day in office, January 20, 2021, he signed an executive order re-admitting the US to the agreement. On Donald Trump’s first day in office upon his return to the White House, January 20, 2025, he signed an executive order once again withdrawing the country from the agreement.
This is no way to run a planet.
I share this with you now after reading The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet (2023) by award-winning environmental journalist and New York Times best-selling author Jeff Goodell.
The combination of thoroughly researched science-based predictions of what is to come and a brilliant flair for engaging storytelling makes this one a remarkable read.
While many conversations about climate change revolve around the increase in the number and intensity of localized events such as hurricanes and wildfires, Goodell focuses his attention upon the other creeping effects of living on an increasingly hotter planet.
For those of us in the United States who have noticed that spring seems to come a little earlier and fall a little later, in many cases, these can be seen as a pleasant respite from cold weather. Of course, many have also noticed that hot summer days in the 90s can be oppressive, even as relief is often found nearby in cooled homes and cars. In short, most Americans have not yet been devastated by a local catastrophe such as hurricanes and wildfires caused by climate change. Goodell predicts with near-certainty that, in the near future, this will no longer be true. This is a primary focus of his book: the increased likelihood of deadly heat waves in places that have had no experience with extreme heat.
People living in sprawling urban areas are particularly susceptible. “Modern cities,” Goodell warns, “are empires of asphalt and concrete and steel, materials that absorb and amplify heat during the day, then radiate it out at night. Air conditioners exhaust hot air, exacerbating the problem of urban heat buildup.”
While humans clearly have the ability to migrate to cooler climates, at least those with the means in developed countries, many in our own country have done exactly the opposite. Most of the fastest growing cities in the US are in Texas, Florida, and Arizona.
Phoenix, Arizona will perhaps become the first metropolitan area in the United States that will become uninhabitable. There is certainly some limit at which it no longer makes sense to live there; 130 degrees? 140 degrees?
Jeff Goodell shares a conversation he had with Mikhail Chester, the director of the Metis Center for Infrastructure and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University. Chester offers that “the risk of a heat-driven catastrophe increases every year. ‘What will the Hurricane Katrina of extreme heat look like?’ he wondered aloud as we sat in a café near the ASU campus a few years ago.” Two thousand human beings in New Orleans—mostly poor people of color—lost their lives in Katrina, a storm which, as told by Chester, “caused a cascading failure of urban infrastructure… that no one really predicted.”
In Phoenix, it “begins with a blackout” that could occur in any number of ways; Wildfire? Blown substation? Russian hacker? Utility worker mistake? Without AC, the “tightly sealed” energy efficient buildings become “dangerous heat traps.” Homes bake in the desert sun. “Traffic signals fail. Highways gridlock with people fleeing the overheated city… gas pumps don’t work, leaving vehicles stranded… Underground water pipes crack from the heat, leaving people scrounging for fresh water. Hospitals [without electricity] overflow with people suffering from heat stroke” Eventually, “the National Guard will need to be called in to maintain order and control looting and general mayhem.” Thousands will die.
“In the café, Chester described all this coolly, as if a Phoenix heat apocalypse is a matter of fact, not hypothesis. ‘How likely is this to happen,’ I asked. ‘About as likely as another Katrina in New Orleans,’ he said. ‘It’s more a question of when, not if.’”
While much of the chatter around climate change revolves—and rightly so—around limiting greenhouse gas emissions, the increasing inevitability of deadly heat waves means today that cities designed for one climate will have to adapt to another.
Despite this harsh heat reality, cities like Phoenix continue to grow because most efforts to curb emissions end up in the political backwaters of a radically divided society. In my view, however, it is difficult to continue describing this as a “political” struggle when one side has for decades denied the reality of climate change; not to mention the scientifically-informed solutions that can help us deal with it. Some steps are being taken, however.
One of the least controversial adaptations is planting trees in urban areas. “Trees,” Goodell writes hopefully, “are superheroes of the climate fight. They inhale [carbon dioxide], and exhale oxygen… They suck up water through the ground and sweat it out through their leaves, which cools the air…” The shade they provide can make an astounding difference in an urban area. “During the summer of 2022,” Goodell cites, “one researcher found that on a hot afternoon the temperature on the ground in front of the Paris Opera House measured 133 degrees [Fahrenheit]. A few steps away, under the shade of the trees on Boulevard des Italiens, the temperature on the sidewalk was only 82 degrees.”
It took more than a decade for Paris to respond to a 2003 heat wave in Europe that claimed 70,000 lives, 15,000 of those in France. After initially trying to limit vehicles traveling through her city—a plan derailed by protests—Mayor Anne Hidalgo “pivoted from cars to trees.” Her goal is to “plant 170,000 trees by 2026.” New York City “has planted over a million trees and is still going.” Other cities around the world have similar goals.
Of course, the trees one plants should be suitable for a future, warmer climate because, as Goodell informs us again, “the climate of cities of today will not be the climate of cities in 2050.”
We have a lot of catching up to do in the tree department. “Since the beginning of human civilization,” Goodell laments, “the number of trees on the planet has dropped by 46 percent.”
Goodell also offers up a host of ways to retrofit buildings in climate-friendly ways; such as using materials and colors that reflect heat instead of absorbing it and designing and situating homes to take advantage of prevailing winds. “Buildings could also be retrofitted,” he claims hopefully, “so they don’t need artificial cooling at all.”
He adds, though, that the expenses for remaking old cities might well surpass the cost of building new ones. “All this stuff,” he says, “is much easier to do if you do it from the beginning.”
“It is the great engineering project of our time,” Goodell proclaims.
A global examination of climate change reveals another troubling reality. Regions of the earth that have been habitable for millennia will become uninhabitable. Species capable of migration to cooler climates will do so. Others will perish. As Goodell writes, we should all be expecting “a vast remapping of the world’s populations.”
Many species are already on the move. A “subtropical species [of spiny lobsters] that are normally found in Baja [Mexico]” have been found in Monterey Bay, a migration of nearly 1000 miles. As tasty as these lobsters might be for diners in Northern California, other, less palatable species are not far behind. Disease-bearing mosquitoes are thriving in the growing expanse of tropical climates. “Some tick species,” Goodell reports, “are moving as much as thirty miles north each year—an unseen parade of bloodsuckers conquering new terrain.”
It has long been known that bats carry viruses that are often deadly to humans. “The list of viruses that have jumped from bats to humans,” Goodell writes, “is long and terrifying: Hendra, Marburg, Ebola, rabies…” The Nipah virus showed up in pigs in Southeast Asia in 1999 and eventually infected nearly three hundred humans. Bat saliva left on fruit infected pigs that then infected pig farmers. More than one hundred deaths were reported and it is believed that in future outbreaks, three of four humans infected will perish.
And, despite claims that the Coronavirus from 2020 was released from a lab in Wuhan, China, many scientists believe that bats were to blame. As food sources dry up for bats on a warming planet, they too will be on the move.
Perhaps most frightening, and much less predictable, Goodell adds, “[t]hawing permafrost in the Arctic is releasing pathogens that haven’t seen daylight for tens of thousands of years.”
As is true with most things, the suffering-to-come will most assuredly fall on those most vulnerable; the elderly and the infirm, and sadly, the poor. Although climate change unfortunately remains within the domain of politics, it is now, clearly, an issue of morality.
This climate inequity explains how those with power and money can so easily and for so long deny the existence of global climate change. It is a tragedy that will strike hardest at “others.” This is not just speculation; it is already happening. According to Scientific American, “[e]xtreme heat is the number-one weather-related cause of death in the U.S., and it kills more people most years than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined.” And we hardly even noticed.**
We haven’t been listening either. Testifying before Congress, NASA scientist James Hansen said “the earth is warmer… than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements… we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect… computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to affect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves…” He said those words in 1988.
And in 2025, we’re still not listening. Goodell writes that, “in rich democracies like the US… partisanship and political dysfunction reign and banning books is discussed with far more urgency than banning fossil fuels or educating people about the dangers of extreme heat.” I imagine that future historians will see that elevating climate deniers to the highest positions of authority in this country will be seen as one of the great follies of mankind; that is, if the book-banners don’t get in their way.
The heat is coming, my friends; there is simply no doubt about it. And when it does, I hope we will not have compounded our neglect of ignoring decades of climate change warnings by failing to do what we can to brace ourselves today.
And, no matter how things turn out, as Jeff Goodell warns us, “This is the great story of our time…”
*United Nations Treaty Collection
