This Heat Will Kill You First


All opinions expressed are my own.

It starts with a breeze. Nothing terrifying. Nothing warns you of death.

It comes through an open window or across the brow of a sweating hiker. It whispers over tin rooftops in Paris, where the buildings weren’t built for this. It brushes the fields where undocumented workers bend under the weight of heat and labor. It rides in on silence, not sirens. Because heat, unlike floods, fires, or storms, is quiet.

That’s what makes it so deadly.

Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet is not a dystopian thought experiment. It’s not an environmentalist’s plea wrapped in metaphor. It is a work of journalism written in the present tense. Not grammatically, but existentially. This book doesn’t speculate about future disasters. It documents the apocalypse already underway.

Published in 2023 by Little, Brown and Company, Goodell’s book details the global rise in extreme heat due to climate change and the way it is killing us, silently, unevenly, and with terrifying speed. It traverses continents, climates, and political ideologies to make a single, inescapable point: heat is not just a temperature. It is a force that reshapes the planet, reorders societies, and exposes every fault line we’ve tried to ignore.

Goodell has long chronicled climate change, but here he makes an urgent rhetorical shift: the term "global warming" is no longer just imprecise; it’s dangerously misleading. It sounds, he argues, like “better beach weather.” What we’re facing is not a gentle warming but a brutal destabilization, and language needs to reflect that. One of his most compelling propositions is deceptively simple: name heat waves the way we name hurricanes. Not for performative drama, but because names signal danger. They command attention. They remind us that heat kills.

And it does kill. Quietly, and then all at once.

In Paris, 15,000 people died in the 2003 European heat wave. In British Columbia in 2021, 600 people perished. In the same year, the town of Lytton was erased by fire after breaking national heat records. These aren’t just statistics; they are the geography of grief. Goodell lets us feel the architecture of that grief: tin rooftops baking like skillets, deserts that turn into ovens, the failure of water systems in places like Chennai.

However, the most harrowing passages occur when he recounts individual stories. Jonathan Gerrish, Ellen Chung, their baby, and their dog, all healthy, set out on a hike in California and never came back. Sebastian Perez, an undocumented worker, died alone in a field in Oregon, surrounded by the plants he was paid to prune. There were no regulations in place to protect him. As of 2023, there are still no federal protections against extreme heat for workers.

Goodell’s work is particularly effective when it pulls back the curtain on the illusions we’ve built to manage, or avoid, the crisis. Chief among them is air conditioning. Yes, it saves lives. But it also sustains a deadly cycle. Cooling buildings accounts for 20% of global building electricity use. As more people purchase units to survive the heat, we consume more energy, emit more carbon, and contribute to the planet's continued warming. By 2050, the world is projected to have 4.5 billion AC units. It’s a feedback loop dressed up as comfort.

What we’re left with is a grim irony: our most effective shield is also our most insidious accelerant.

Yet this book is not without hope, though it’s the kind of hope that burns. It suggests that awareness can be a form of armor, that language can be weaponized not to obfuscate but to clarify. Goodell’s stripped-down prose makes no room for euphemism. It insists we confront the present as it is: lethal, unjust, and urgent.

In a world that’s growing numb to catastrophe, The Heat Will Kill You First demands attention not with spectacle but with precision. It reminds us that the end doesn’t always come with a bang. Sometimes, it comes with a breeze.

And we don’t notice we’re dying until it’s too late.

Location: Washington, DC, USA

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