The Heat Will Kill You First

Where Wallace-Wells’ book lays out the big picture, Goodell’s book gets us up close and personal with the core danger of climate change: unsurvivable heat.

I felt like I could see and feel the presence of this life-threatening force as if it were a malevolent demon in a horror movie, yet I also came away from the book with a deeper scientific understanding of the harms of using fossil fuels. Such a good read!

I love the breadth and depth of reporting in this book—how Jeff Goodell ties together a vast array of consequences, some already catastrophic, of Earth’s rising temperature. He traveled the world and spoke to countless people, from scientists to undocumented farm workers, telling stories of tragedy and hope.

You will finish it astounded at how human health and civilization are webbed to temperature—and how we are unraveling the fabric of our own survival.

I read a lot of apocalyptic science fiction, but this is a scarily well-written apocalyptic fact. Jeff writes about a terrifyingly relevant topic today: the heating of the planet.

This is something most of us do not understand at a visceral level. Jeff does a brilliant job using anecdotes, statistics, and just plain great storytelling to describe what happens to humanity in a world where temperatures are inexorably climbing. It is like a punch in the gut and puts the story of a “frog in a slowly boiling pot” into a whole new context.

I have personally changed a lot… show more.