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The Heat Will Kill You First

Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

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The Heat Will Kill You First

Written by: Jeff Goodell
Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
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About this listen

New York Times best-selling journalist Jeff Goodell presents a "masterful, bracing" (David Wallace-Wells) examination of the impact that temperature rise will have on our lives and on our planet, offering a vital new perspective on where we are headed, how we can prepare, and what is at stake if we fail to act.​

“When heat comes, it’s invisible. It doesn’t bend tree branches or blow hair across your face to let you know it’s arrived…. The sun feels like the barrel of a gun pointed at you.”

The world is waking up to a new reality: wildfires are now seasonal in California, the Northeast is getting less and less snow each winter, and the ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctica are melting fast. Heat is the first order threat that drives all other impacts of the climate crisis. And as the temperature rises, it is revealing fault lines in our governments, our politics, our economy, and our values. The basic science is not complicated: Stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow, and the global temperature will stop rising tomorrow. Stop burning fossil fuels in 50 years, and the temperature will keep rising for 50 years, making parts of our planet virtually uninhabitable. It’s up to us. The hotter it gets, the deeper and wider our fault lines will open.

The Heat Will Kill You First is about the extreme ways in which our planet is already changing. It is about why spring is coming a few weeks earlier and fall is coming a few weeks later and the impact that will have on everything from our food supply to disease outbreaks. It is about what will happen to our lives and our communities when typical summer days in Chicago or Boston go from 90° F to 110°F. A heatwave, Goodell explains, is a predatory event— one that culls out the most vulnerable people. But that is changing. As heatwaves become more intense and more common, they will become more democratic.

As an award-winning journalist who has been at the forefront of environmental journalism for decades, Goodell’s new book may be his most provocative yet, explaining how extreme heat will dramatically change the world as we know it. Masterfully reported, mixing the latest scientific insight with on-the-ground storytelling, Jeff Goodell tackles the big questions and uncovers how extreme heat is a force beyond anything we have reckoned with before.

©2023 Jeff Goodell (P)2023 Little, Brown & Company
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What the critics say

"The climate crisis brings no greater threat than the prospect of deadly extreme heat. In The Heat Will Kill You First, Jeff Goodell brings a mix of fantastic storytelling, lucid science communication, and eternal optimism in detailing the profound threat we face with the climate crisis and what we can still do about it.”—Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor, University of Pennsylvania and author of The New Climate War

“It is already a new world, hotter than ever before in human history and getting rapidly hotter still. The Heat Will Kill You First is a masterful, bracing, vivid portrait of the future we now know will be shaped, like clay, by that heat—a godlike force, as Goodell writes, governing all life conducted under its profound and brutal reign.”—David Wallace-Wells, author of The New York Times bestselling The Uninhabitable Earth

“This is a scary book. It humanizes global warming by telling amazing stories of individuals already affected by it, making very clear the danger we are putting ourselves in. We all have a cognitive map in our head that includes a near future, which is sketchier than our map of the present, being made of our hopes and fears. This book will sharpen that sketch in electrifying ways. You won’t see the world the same way after reading it.”—Kim Stanley Robinson, New York Times bestselling author of The High Sierra and The Ministry for the Future

What listeners say about The Heat Will Kill You First

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Excellent nonfiction

Really interesting book about climate change. Covered lots of topics in an organized way. Informative but not depressing despite the bleak subject matter. I’d like to read Goodell’s previous books.

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okay book

This book was okay but not great. I thought it started stronger than it finished. Partially this is because of a completely unnecessary chapter in which the author describes a trip with his friends to go on a skiing expedition, which he thinly layers over with polar bear preservation. Also some minor points that irritated me. First , the author acknowledges that the vast majority of the world uses the metric system for temperature and then goes on and gives all the figures solely in Fahrenheit. Second, the author rightly describes how burning greenhouse gases are what is causing the heat problem on earth. But then without any irony at all he describes all these cool but unnecessary trips he took all over the world to go hiking and exploring and didn't mention all the GHG he burnt in doing that...

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