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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. It's Climate Week, and thousands participated in a climate change protest in New York City yesterday. One of them was a representative for the New York's 14th district, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who described the movement to end fossil fuels as "too big and too radical to ignore." Also too big to ignore the heat. The World Meteorological Organization declared that 2023 was the hottest summer on record in the Northern Hemisphere, and the heat is what we need to be most worried about when it comes to climate change according to author Jeff Goodell. His new book, a New York Times bestseller has the urgent title, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.

Goodell traveled around the world researching this book, facing a mama polar bear in her shrinking habitat, and visiting a Northern California hiking trail where a young family died from heat exposure in the summer of '21. Goodell argues that higher global temperatures are what contribute most to ecosystem disruptions, forest fires, famine, rising sea levels, the emergence of new diseases, and death by heat-related complications.

In his introduction, Jeff writes, "In this book, my goal is to convince you to think about heat in a different way. The kind of heat I'm talking about here is not in an incremental bump on the thermometer or the slow slide of spring into summer. It is heat as an active force, one that can bend railroad tracks and kill you before you even understand that your life is at risk. This is a form of heat that has been unleashed upon us through the burning of fossil fuels. In this sense, extreme heat is an entirely human artifact, a legacy of human civilization as real as the Great Wall of China." Jeff Goodell is speaking tonight at 5:30 PM at The Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU. He joins me now in studio to discuss his book, The Heat Will Kill You First. Jeff, thanks for being with us.

Jeff Goodell: Thank you for having me, and congratulations on your fifth anniversary. I'm very honored to be here.

Alison Stewart: We got here. Let's hope we're here another five years. Let's be clear about the heat you're talking about. What is dangerous heat as opposed to heat that makes me really uncomfortable or head to the beach or find shade

Jeff Goodell: It's all a matter of degrees, literally. Dangerous heat is the heat that we are not able as human beings to cope with. When our body temperatures start to rise, we have one cooling mechanisms for our bodies, which is sweat, and that works pretty well. When the temperatures rise too far too fast or you're exercising in extremely warm weather, extremely hot weather, our body can't cope with it. It puts an enormous strain on our body, our heart starts to pound. It has all kinds of complications to us and it can kill you very quickly.

Alison Stewart: That's really an interesting part of the book, is the idea that sometimes people don't even understand what happened to them physically when they are suffering from heat exhaustion or heat stroke. Why is it that, we as humans, you think we evolved to protect ourselves, and we have evolved in some ways to have protections, why don't we understand what's happening to us as heat is taking our bodies into a dangerous and critical zone?

Jeff Goodell: That's an interesting question. This book started for me on a 115-degree day in Phoenix when I happened to be there to do some other reporting for a different story. I took a 15-block walk on this extremely hot day. By the end of the walk, my heart was pounding, and I was feeling dizzy, and I realized, oh my gosh, if I had to go another 15 blocks, I don't know what would happen to me.

Our bodies react to heat without any kind of conscious awareness. It's programmed into our brains. Our metabolism regulates our body temperatures, and so we're not conscious of it in the sense that we get a little alarm system from our hypothalamus saying, "Oh, we're overheating now." It just feels uncomfortable and it's often not until you get to the dangerous zones of dizziness of heart pounding in your chest in a very extreme way that you realize how dangerous it is. The difficulty though is that when you get to that point, if you don't get out of the heat real quick you can be in big trouble

Alison Stewart: Scientifically, why is it that cities like New York can feel so much hotter than surrounding areas? What causes these heat islands?

Jeff Goodell: This heat island effect is very well documented in virtually every city. Some more and worse than others, but our cities are made of asphalt and concrete and steel and glass, and all these are qualities that absorb heat and radiate it back. It's well documented that cities are 10, 15, even 20 degrees hotter than the surrounding area, plus you have air conditioning units that are running. Air conditioning is a whole other complicated story, but-

Alison Stewart: We'll get there.

Jeff Goodell: -they're not magic. They take heat from the inside and blow it outside. They also contribute to the urban heat island effect. One of the big things that progressive cities are trying to do now is combat this urban heat island effect with more greenery, more open spaces, inviting nature back into cities.

Alison Stewart: In The New York Times, there's a piece about how the Asian island country of Singapore is being aggressive about cooling down their cities. It's in today's, or maybe it was yesterday's. In your book, you write about how the mayor of Paris has made big changes, even at her own political cost in some ways. What are some of the ways that Paris has changed to address the heat? I think New Yorkers can probably feel like there's some sort of relationship between a city like Paris and New York.

Jeff Goodell: Yes. Paris has done some extraordinary things. Part of it was motivated by an extreme heat wave in Paris a decade or so ago that killed thousands of people. There's a very vivid memory of the risks of heat in Paris. The mayor there has done a lot of very progressive things to try to combat that and to reinvent the city in the context, not just of heat, but of of climate. One is to abolish cars in the inner part of the city to allow more green space, more room for trees, more room for urban parks.

There's been efforts to build cooling centers, places where people can go on extremely hot days if they don't have air conditioning in their houses, and many people in Paris don't have air conditioning. There are things that seem not directly related to this but are really important like cleaning up the [unintelligible 00:07:27] so that you can swim in it now. That is a big deal, having these public areas where you have refuge. I lived in New York for a long time, but I live in Austin now, Austin, Texas, and we have this thing called Barton Springs there which is a big--

Alison Stewart: Amazing.

Jeff Goodell: Yes, it's amazing. It's a public pool that becomes a really crowded space on these extremely hot days in Texas. You can almost hear people's bodies sizzling as they jump in.

Alison Stewart: What are some things that architects of the future, or maybe I should say architects now should be considering as we're building our cities, as we see new buildings going up that could be a way to deal with this heat?

Jeff Goodell: That's a great question. I think one of the most important things is breaking our addiction to air conditioning. The way buildings are built now is they're sealed tight and there's no or not much thinking about ventilation or things like that because it's all mechanical. There's a lot of consequences to that from energy demand to the risks that happen when the power might go out. There are ways of designing buildings that don't require air conditioning or as much air conditioning.

I just had a conversation several weeks ago with one of the leading architects in the world who I asked, I said, "In 15th century Iraq, they were able to build buildings without air conditioning and make them so cool that you could make ice without any electricity or anything. Don't you know how to build great buildings today without air conditioning?" He said, "Of course, we do. We know how to do that, but our clients demand it. There's this addiction to comfort that a lot of people have now, that the temperature shall always be at 68 or 69 or 71 degrees, and that we'll allow no variation in that." Breaking that addiction, changing the way we think about buildings being built so that we go back to a natural cooling is, I think, a big deal.

Alison Stewart: I was thinking about this and you may not have the answer, but I'm curious what you would think. Sometimes when there's a shift in what architecture could be to answer one problem, another one is created. If you go to St. Louis, everything's made out of brick, but that was because of the great fires. Now, if you go to St. Louis and it's 116 degrees, those homes, and those people who live there, they're like ovens. It's a different problem now. Is there anything we should be aware of as we think about solutions or anything that you've heard or seen in your research where, "Okay, we solved this problem, but we should be aware that it could open up this other door?"

Jeff Goodell: I think that's a level of complexity on this that we're so much in the early stages of moving from brick to the next thing, that it's not even really clear what those next level complexities will be. One thing I didn't mention when we think about reinventing cities, it's simple things like white roofs and green roofs that reflect away light, or use the roof space for vegetation and for people to grow gardens and things like that. That helps dissipate heat. I'm sure that there are complexities to these kinds of changes that we will find out about. Right now, I think we need to get going just with the reinvention of things as they are. We have cities that were built for a climate that no longer exists. That is a big idea to get your mind around.

Alison Stewart: My guest, Jeff Goodell. The name of the book is, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. I think we have to talk about inequity. You write about this in the book. Obviously, you talk about Singapore and France are two relatively wealthy countries. You write about how economic inequity and heat, and you make it clear that it's poor and marginalized people who are most affected by the heat. Where's a place in the world where that inequity feels particularly stark?

Jeff Goodell: I think it feels pretty stark everywhere. I think it feels pretty stark in Phoenix, Arizona. It feels pretty stark in Austin, Texas. It feels pretty stark in New York City. It feels pretty stark in Lagos, Nigeria. It feels pretty stark in Paris. I think that it's a universal truth that the people that-- there's a, what I call in my book the dividing line between the cooled and the damned. The people who have access to air conditioning, who have access to refuges, who can leave a place, and people who don't. It's not just the simple dividing lines that I think pop into a lot of people's heads. When I was reporting this book in Phoenix, I spent a lot of time with elderly people, people on marginal incomes who even had air conditioning-

Alison Stewart: But couldn't afford.

Jeff Goodell: -but couldn't afford to run it because it's so expensive. They were essentially every day making some terrible arbitrage between, shall I run my air conditioning for two hours, or run it for an hour, and therefore, have enough money maybe this week to buy groceries? When you're on that limited budget, and if you guess wrong on that calculation, you can die very quickly. That's the hidden tragedy of all of this, is the vulnerability of people who are largely unseen in the media and in a lot of public policy on this.

Alison Stewart: Heat disrupts ecosystems. There's a lot of different examples, but I'm going to have you walk us through pine bark beetles.

Jeff Goodell: [laughs] Pine bark beetles are a great example, and I'm glad you asked me about that. You're the first person in all my interviews on this book to ask me about pine bark beetles.

Alison Stewart: I have to give it. That is my producer Jordan who loves this story, so I have to give shout out to Jordan for the pine bark beetles

Jeff Goodell: Pine bark beetles are interesting because heat affects all living things. One of the things that heat does is it basically amps up your metabolism. It makes your heart beat faster, makes your bodies move faster, and it does that to insects, too. Especially insects that are, obviously, cold-blooded. It's like speed. Heat is like speed for a lot of insects, and pine bark beetles in particular. As they get amped up, they begin to spread more widely through the Rocky Mountains. Is the clearest example. They particularly go after heat stress trees.

As the planet becomes hotter, the trees are more stressed because the soil is drier. They become more vulnerable. The pine bark beetles are amped up. The pine bark beetles then can prey on these trees. The trees become sicker, they die, and then they're more vulnerable to wildfires. You have these cascading consequences. Here in New York, we obviously felt this summer the consequences of wildfires, and how this is all connected. The pine bark beetle, in a sense, you could argue were the engines of the orange skies that we experienced here in the East Coast this summer.

Alison Stewart: You write vividly about the mama polar bear and the cubs, and how scary that must have been. I think this sparked someone to send us a message. It says, "The Antarctic ice cap has been doing extraordinarily scary things all year, but this month in particular, it's the worst month ever for ice around the Antarctica since they started keeping records." This is from a caller. I'm not sure if I can verify this, but I think we all know the issues. He wanted to know if you can talk about this?

Jeff Goodell: Yes, I can. Just to be a little pedantic, the polar bears are in the Arctic and the caller's talking about Antarctica, which is in the South.

Alison Stewart: That's not pedantic. That's just right.

Jeff Goodell: Well, still, it feels a little.

Alison Stewart: that's okay.

Jeff Goodell: Do we really need to bring this point up? Anyway, I went to Antarctica. I wrote a chapter about that in the book. Antarctica is an example of how-- People say, "Why did you go to Antarctica to write a book about extreme heat? It's the coldest place on the planet." The reason I went there was to show that even small changes in temperature can have enormous impacts. I was there for two months and with a bunch of scientists and researchers on a ship. Basically what we learned is that a warming of the southern notion of just one degree Fahrenheit has changed the ice sheet dynamics tremendously in Antarctica. That's what the caller is talking about.

The main thing it's doing is just this small change in temperature is allowing the slightly warmer water to get underneath the enormous ice sheets and begin to melt them from below. As they melt from below, they become destabilized. As they become destabilized, the risk of catastrophic collapse, not really melting per se, but a collapse, like a bunch of ice cubes dumped out of an ice tray becomes bigger and bigger. What we're seeing with this decline of sea ice right now in Antarctica are the continuing signs of the consequences of that warming. When you talk about tipping points for the planet and large consequences, Antarctica is one of the biggest ones. Especially for New Yorkers, because when you think about sea level rise and the consequences of more rapid sea level rise, places like New York are, of course, on the front lines of vulnerability.

Alison Stewart: What's the connection between heat and illness and the spread of disease?

Jeff Goodell: Well, that's another great question because when we talk about heat, we think about sweating and heart attacks, and heat stroke and things like that. It also changes the spread of disease in very powerful and direct ways, because as I mentioned before, all living things are vulnerable to changes in heat. They all want to find their goldilock zone. When our world heats up, people move, animals move, everything moves, trying to find a cooler niche. One great example of the things that move are mosquitoes. Mosquitoes, as everyone knows, are very mobile and they carry things with them like Zika and dengue fever.

Now in some cases in the United States even malaria. We're seeing a resurgence in malaria in the southern US for the first time in decades. In Africa, malaria kills 400,000 people or so every year. As the temperature warms, these mosquitoes are moving into new areas and they're carrying these diseases with them. They're exposing whole new populations to these diseases in a way that is very directly related to heat and to the migration of these animals. There's many other examples in the northeast. Lyme disease with ticks moving farther north because it's warmer and they're able to populate there. Bats, changing their habitats and moving to new areas and the potential viruses and things that bats carry. Disease is one of the big but unspoken impacts of our rapidly warming planet.

Alison Stewart: Your have a very vivid description of a mosquito bite. This is a stuff of horror movies. I'll never think about a mosquito bite the same. Also the stuff of horror movies, The Blob. Truly was a horror movie once upon a time, but there's something called the blob. I'm going to ask you to explain it.

Jeff Goodell: The blob is basically like a, shall I say poetic name that a scientist gave to a marine heat wave off the coast of California in 2014 and lasted, I think, until 2017. We think of heat waves as land events because that's how we feel them, but they also happened in the ocean, and in a similar way due to changes in circulation just as terrestrial heat waves happen because of changes in the circulation of the jet stream and atmospheric patterns. Circulation changes in the ocean have big impacts. They create these kinds of heat waves. They can be completely devastating to marine life.

Some marine life can move around. Obviously, certain kinds of many fish are able to move to cooler waters and things, but also many things are not able to move. The classic example of this is coral reefs, one of the jewels of life on this planet. I've spent a lot of time diving around reefs. They're very vulnerable to these marine heat waves. These heat waves come in and they bleach out. They basically kill the coral. Those coral, of course, cannot just jump up on their little coral legs and run north. Like any other thing, when it gets too hot, they die. Coral reefs are one of the frontline victims of this rapidly warming world we're living in.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. My guest is Jeff Goodell its author. Where do you see hope if you see it anywhere?

Jeff Goodell: Well, I see hope in this. I see that our world is changing fast, and that it is very clear that we're going to have to change basically everything about how we live, how we get our energy, how we build cities, where we get our food. This is not a negotiable point. It is going to happen. It is happening right now. I think that by understanding these risks, understanding what is happening, we really have an opportunity to build a better world.

I think that we can use this dramatic moment that we're in, and it'll be stretching for the next few decades, to really make changes that bring more equity, that are safer, that make cities more pleasant places to live, that allow us to get off of fossil fuels and create energy in new kinds of ways. I think it's all about what we want and how politically engaged and how knowledgeable we want to get on this subject

Alison Stewart: For something that we all feel, and we all felt it this summer, and it felt it previous summers, why do you think heat is been under the radar a little bit?

Jeff Goodell: Because it's invisible, for one thing. It is not like when a hurricane hits-- Hurricane Sandy hit New York, I was here, you could see it in the sky. It was pretty obvious what was happening. Heat waves are invisible. That's part of it. The other part of it is that people generally like warmer weather. When you say global warming, people just say, "Oh, that sounds like a better beach weather." You talk about the dangers of 2 degrees of warming like the UN does. People think, "2 degrees, 78, 80, what's the big deal?"

It's very hard to process the consequences and the impacts of these small changes. I do think that the extremity of the summer, which is just a sort of foreshadowing of the more extreme summers that we are certainly going to have until we stop burning fossil fuels, has begun to change people's views about that. I think it has awoken people to the risks and to the urgency of getting smart about the risks of heat.

Alison Stewart: Who's been a leader on this?

Jeff Goodell: Oh, well, there's been-- Antonio Guterres in the UN has been a global leader on this. He's been very outspoken. He somewhat controversially talked about it's time for a new phrase "global boiling", which sparked a lot of controversy. There's a lot of struggle for what kind of language to use with this. There's been a lot of activists who've been on the forefront of talking about these justice and equity questions. Cities like Phoenix are really getting schooled in the risks and dangers and really starting to think differently. We mentioned Paris earlier. I think that there's a lot of broad awakening going on right now. The question is, it's not happening fast enough.

Alison Stewart: Jeff Goodell is the author of The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. He'll be speaking tonight at 5:30 at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU. Jeff, thank you for coming to the studio today.

Jeff Goodell: Thank you. Again, happy anniversary.

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