beenpart of the public lexicon for decades, but what once seemed like some dystopian distant future is according to today's guest, a reality.

Where higher temperatures are reshaping agriculture, animal migrations, the health of the oceans, and our very future.

He's Jeff Goodell this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salves Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is bestselling author Jeff Goodell, whose books on climate and energy capture the moment we live in and the future we face.

His latest is "The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet."

He joins us today from Austin, Texas.

Welcome, Jeff.

- Good morning, happy to be here.

- Well, I gotta tell you, "The Heat Will Kill you First" is a tremendous read.

I found that you had essentially appropriated heat as the main character in the story.

Why heat?

- Well, because heat is something that, you know, I think a lot of people think they understand but don't, I mean, it's a thing that, you know, is part of our lives, you know, and every time you get into an Uber or go to a dinner party, the first thing people talk about is the weather and the heat and whether it's hot or not.

But I think that the consequences of rising heat are kind of widely misunderstood.

And I really wanted to explore in detail why when we talk about climate change, when we talk about global warming, we're not just talking about better beach weather, we're talking about real risks to not only our own lives, but basically to every living thing on the planet.

And to really explore the sort of larger consequences of rising heat.

- There was at one point, I recall you talked about that notion of climate change or global warming, it's almost comforting, right?

It sounds sort of minor, like, warming is sort of like a warm blanket, but heat is something, I dunno, more aggressive.

That decision to use that terminology.

Can you talk about the relative power of those terms?

- Do you mean the terms climate change and global warming - Versus heat, your focus on heat?

- Right.

Well, you know, I think that, you know, global warming and climate change are both very kind of gentle terms.

And climate change and global warming are not gentle phenomenon.

This is a very dramatic phenomenon that is happening to our earth, is happening very rapidly, and those phrases don't capture it.

And that's part of the larger problem with talking about climate change in general is that it just seems like, you know, a kinda distant event that's happening to far off places, maybe to future generations.

It just seems, you know, we have a lot going on in our world, obviously, and so it seems it is very easy to just sort of push this off.

And that's one of the reasons why I gave this book the title, "The Heat Will Kill You First," which is not a title that at first my publishers loved.

They were like, "Are you sure this is the title you want to go with?"

But I really pushed for it because I really wanted to make climate change feel intimate.

I wanted it to be about you and me and the people you love and the things that you love and the risks that we face in the here and now.

And I thought the title evoked that.

- So Jeff, in a minute we're gonna ask you to... You've agreed to read a passage from the book, but before we get to that, in the acknowledgements you write that "The Heat Will Kill You first," "Was born on a 117-degree day in Arizona and came of age during a long midnight drive across Texas with my wife Simone, during which she convinced me that heat was an important subject for a book and I needed to write it."

Can you expand on that a little bit?

I mean, this sounds like this was not an epiphany, but this was the spark, pardon the pun that led to the book.

- Yeah, you know, this is my seventh book and a lot of books rise out of a kind of, you know, long musing about ideas and thoughts and you bounce ideas around with friends and editors and things like that.

This book had a very different beginning and, you know, I could pinpoint the day it was in, you know, June of 2018, I was in Phoenix for a meeting that had nothing to do with this.

It was a very hot day.

I was running late as usual.

I called an Uber.

The Uber was late as usual.

And so I decided that I would basically run 15 blocks downtown to my meeting.

And by the time I got 10 blocks, my heart was pounding, I was lightheaded, I thought I was gonna pass out.

And I had the not so profound revelation that heat was dangerous and that if I had to go, if I had to run another 10 blocks, I might not make it.

And this sounds like an ordinary, you know, not such a profound revelation.

But for me it was profound.

I had been writing about climate change for 15 years at that time, and it never occurred to me that heat was dangerous in a personal way.

And that moment really made me understand that if I don't get it, if I don't understand how dangerous heat is, then I bet a lot of other people don't either.

And then on that, I explained to this... We were talking about this on the Midnight Drive with my wife Simone across Texas, and she was basically arguing, "Look, you know, this is a subject that is intimate to a lot of people.

This is a subject that there's a huge opportunity to kind of, you know, reframe for your readers."

This is important in ways that talking about kind of climate policy or melting glaciers or something like that really is not, this is the sort of big, big kind of engine behind climate change and what you're, what you're interested in.

And she just really made the case that this was a challenge that I should rise to in redefining what heat really means.

- So now we'd like you to read that passage and I think it'll give our audience a really sobering look at heat along with other factors in the climate crisis, including sea level rise and so forth.

So, thanks for agreeing to do this.

- Sure, happy to.

You probably think of heat on a temperature scale either Fahrenheit or Celsius.

You think of it as a gradual linear thing.

70 degrees is a little hotter than 68 degrees, which is a little hotter than 65 degrees.

The change of seasons also plays into this incremental perception of heat.

Winter warms into spring, spring into summer.

Yes, there are some days that are noticeably hotter or colder than others, but we crank up the air conditioning or throw on a sweater, we trust it'll pass and things will return to normal.

Temperature is a merry-go-round we are used to riding.

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 an active force, one that can bend railroad tracks and kill you before you even understand your life is at risk.

Scientists don't fully understand how fast this heat can move or where it will appear next, but there's one thing scientists do know.

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.

This heat we are pumping into the sky is the prime mover of the climate crisis.

The climate impacts you hear about most often from sea level rise to drought to wildfires are all second order effects of a hotter planet.

The first order effect is heat.

As a force, heat is mysterious because it's effects are both slow and fast.

Think of parched wheat fields slowly dried out by months of heat that pulls moisture out of the ground and lifts it into the sky.

Then think of heat waves that are the cosmic equivalent of a bug zapper that kills you before you understand what's happening.

Extreme heat penetrates every living cell and melts them like a popsicle on a summer sidewalk.

It reverses evolution driving entropy and disorder.

It is the widening guyer that the W. B. Yeats wrote about.

An extinction force that takes the universe back to its messy beginnings.

Before there was light, there was heat.

It is the origin of all things and the end of all things.

- That is totally brilliant writing and it really captures what we're talking about here.

Is there any doubt in legitimate scientific circles that carbon, the burning of fossil fuels is responsible for heat?

- No.

- It's no, it's scientific certainty that has been understood for 100 years or more.

- [Jim] And yet.

- There's no doubt, there is, of course questioning about when you have a rise of three or four degrees, what are the implications of that in the natural world?

How fast will the glaciers melt?

What are the effects in the Amazon rainforest?

What are the effects on human beings?

What are the thermal limits of various living creatures?

But the relationship between burning fossil fuels, rising CO2 and a hotter planet is as real and straightforward as the science of gravity.

- Well, so let's get into what heat is going to do, and maybe we start with a broad overview and then we'll get into some of the specifics.

So on a broad almost global scale and then down to the individual scale, what is heat doing to the atmosphere, to the oceans, to the planet?

- Well, I mean, it's hard to summarize that briefly, but, you know, it's making it hotter and as it gets hotter, it has profound effects on all living things.

I mean, one of the things that comes up a lot is that people will say, "Oh, the planet's been through hot periods before, this is no different, you know, this is just a natural cycle."

And it's certainly true that the planet has been through many hot periods before, you know, there have been alligators in what is now the Arctic, right?

But what's different now is that it's warming up much faster because there are burning of CO2 and the key issue is that it is happening that human civilization has evolved in the last 10 or 12,000 years during a very stable period of the Earth's climate.

So what is at risk as the temperature rises quickly is human civilization not the planet.

And by that I mean, everything about what we've built and what we are adapted to, right?

So on hot days, you have bridges in New York that don't open and close the way they're supposed to.

You have runways that begin to melt.

You have outdoor workers that, you know, has.

You have outdoor workers that, you know, howsoever, heat stroke, all of these, every living thing and everything that we've built, I use the phrase in the book, "Has a goldilock zone," a certain range of temperatures that they can thrive under.

And the fundamental thing that's happening on our planet right now is that we are moving out of the goldilock zone during which human civilization has evolved and the implications for that, for everything from the life in the oceans to the crops that we grow and where we grow them, to the stability of the glaciers that control the sea level rise to the changing range of disease carrying insects like mosquitoes and ticks.

Everything is implicated in this.

And so, you know, one way to think about it is this sort of great rearrangement that's happening in our planet as this goldilock zone shifts.

- So you mentioned agriculture.

Can you get into, you mentioned crops rather, can you get into more detail the effects on agriculture, both in the United States and globally?

It's changing agriculture for certain.

- It's and having a big impact and the knock on impacts of that are huge.

So what is happening is that, you know, crops that we depend on, whether it's, you know, rice in Asia or corn in the United States or wheat in Europe, they are like us and like every other living creature they have their goldilock zone, they have a zone during which they thrive.

And anyone who does any gardening or anything knows this, right?

And what is broadly happening is as it gets hotter, it's not only these growing zones are reaching, you know, the equivalent of their thermal limits, the crops, the rice, the corn, the wheat that we depend on are, you know, having something, you know, a plant version of heat exhaustion and heat stroke.

And they need to be cooled off.

And we are not air conditioning, you know, there's no possibility of air conditioning the wheat fields and the corn fields and the rice fields.

So the question is, what was going to happen?

And what is going to happen is we're going to these... Agriculture's going to have to move and migrate and change.

You know, one of the big revelations I had in reporting this book was I had the kind of path informed view that, you know, this was not such a big deal because a lot of the crops that we depend on, rice and wheat and corn, for example, are highly engineered already, right?

We have corporations that do tremendous amounts of kinda honing of these crops to make for optimal growth in certain conditions.

And my naive belief was, "Oh, we'll just genetically adapt corn or wheat or rice or whatever to these hotter conditions."

But one of the things that I learned is that, you know, heat is not a trait like, you know, blue heat tolerance is not a trait like blue eyes or something like that is profoundly woven into the sort of genetic fabric of all living things.

And you can't just tweak a couple of genes and the corn will grow fine into 130 degree weather.

So that brings up all kinds of questions about, you know, are we going to continue to be able to grow as much corn in the US for example, as we do now.

I spent a lot of time in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, which is one of the most kind of agricultural wonderland.

And the farmers there were, asking the same questions.

You know, the corn and other agricultural products there are, you know, reaching their limits and they are seeing, you know, massive crop failures during these kinds of heat waves.

And so what's going to happen?

We're not gonna just shift corn fields up into Canada or something like that.

And when you think about the implications of this in places where you already have food shortages and things in Sub-Saharan Africa and other places like that, you can see the profound human implications of this and how this kind of warming and crop failure can drive political instability, migration and all kinds of things like that.

- Well, I was gonna ask you about the migration piece of it because you explained that species are on the move that insects, that aquatica animals and human beings are all moving because of the heat.

One of the things that I find fascinating is this idea of a wet bulb temperature.

Would you explain that for us and tell us why it's so critical?

- Yeah, so that's a really interesting question and I'm glad you brought it up.

One of the tricky things about heat is how you measure it.

And, it's not just the, you know, there's the absolute air temperature, right, which we're all familiar with.

It's 72 degrees in Austin today or whatever.

And then most of us are familiar also with humidity, which is the amount of sort of moisture in that air.

So there's humid heat and dry heat.

In the book I talk about why humid heat is more dangerous for humans than dry heat, because be simple about it, our sweat doesn't evaporate as well when there's a lot of moisture in the air and sweat is our, you know, main mechanism for cooling off.

But even those two things don't really capture an accurate measurement of heat on our bodies because as we all know, you know, it makes a difference if you're standing in the shade or if you're out in the sun.

It makes a difference if there's a breeze or not.

And so the wet bulb globe temperature is...

It was developed by the military actually because they're very concerned with heat exposure for soldiers for operation in war zones.

And they wanted a more accurate measure of the actual impact of heat on a human body.

So in addition to taking in air temperature and in addition to taking in, you know, humidity, it's also combines a measurement of the amount of direct sunlight, the amount of the wind speed factors, and in some cases even the sort of level of physical exertion.

So it was an attempt to get a real precise measurement of the heat conditions as they affect a human body at any given moment.

- Can you give us a little more detail about the effects of extreme heat on individuals and populations?

I mean, you talked about trying to walk through a hot area and you got 10 blocks and you were out breath and thought you might faint, but there were even more significant effects.

I'm thinking of people with asthma and I'm thinking of people who have COPD and even people who do not have health issues.

Can you give us some detail on that please, Jeff?

- Sure, I mean, you know, I think the frame it, I think it's really important and I think most people realize this, that it, you know, your body temperature is really important to everything about our metabolic functions, right?

When you're not feeling good and you go to the doctor, what is the very first thing that he or she does is take your temperature.

And we all know that if you have a temperature of even 101 degrees, that's a problem.

So, we function very well within this sort of very narrow range of temperature.

And so it doesn't take much.

Once you get up into 101, 102, 103 degrees, you begin to get into real trouble.

So, our body's heat modulating system works, you know, on its own, we don't think about it and it works pretty well under most conditions.

But when it's hotter out this the heat in our body begins to rise and the only mechanism we have to deal with it is sweat.

And so as our body heat gets hotter and hotter, what happens basically is our heart starts pumping faster and faster, trying to push blood out from the internal organs in the brain towards the surface of the skin so that it can be cooled as the sweat evaporates and it uses the cooling of the evapotranspiration from the water to cool off the blood, which cools off the body.

The problem is that we're not all equally good at that.

So if you're 80 years old and you have a heart condition, your heart is not gonna work as well at pumping that blood around and it's gonna put more of a strain on your heart.

So you're much more vulnerable to heat conditions.

If you're an infant and your sweat glands are not fully developed, you're going to have a much more difficult time releasing that heat than you will be when you're older.

If you are on certain kinds of drugs that inhibit or interfere with the thermal regulation in our bodies, those will have implications also.

We've seen, there's been a lot of studies recently showing that the risk of miscarriage for pregnant women is much higher during heat waves than in cooler conditions.

It's not exactly clear what the mechanism for that is, but it's very clear.

And it's also interesting, there's been a lot of new interesting work about the psychological implications of higher temperatures and how it interferes with brain functions.

For example, seeing that, there was a recent study that looked at the test scores of different high schools comparing school in the same regions with air conditioning and without.

And the test scores in schools with air conditioning were about 10% higher throughout the study because of the, you know, our brains work better kind of when they're cooler.

And we also have seen, there's lots of studies showing increase in political violence, and we all kind of know this, right?

We get irritated when it's hot, we get cranky.

In fact, just last week I started reading Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment," which is a story about a murder in 19th century Russia.

And the very first line of the book is, "It was a very hot day in St.

Petersburg."

(all laughing) I mean, he intuitively understood this, right?

And so, all these other more subtle implications or complications from rising heat are just beginning to be understood.

And to me it's evidence of like how little we really understand the full physiological and psychological impacts of rising temperatures.

- Jeff, one of the things that I learned in reading this book was the progress that's been made in attributing the cause or the link of extreme heat events back to the changing climate.

Could you explain that a little bit for our audience?

- Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up that's a really important thing.

So, you know, whenever an extreme event happens, whether it's a heat wave or a hurricane or a drought or floods or whatever, you know, there's always this debate about was this caused by global warming?

Was this caused by climate change or not, right?

And the answer from scientists has always been, you know, it started with Jim Hansen, the kind of godfather of climate science that who was head of NASA for so long.

He would always say, "Well, we can't say that climate change caused the heat wave, but we can say that it loads the dice that it makes it more likely, but we can't actually say, "Okay, this was caused by that."

Well, this new branch of climate science, it's been around only about 10 years called climate attribution science uses climate models and kind of counterfactuals basically creates a climate model using the data points of a particular weather event.

Say the heat wave in the Pacific Northwest in 2021 was a great example.

They put in all the data points of that into a climate model.

They run it and then they take the CO2 level, they lower the CO2 level in the atmosphere in that same climate model to the kind of pre-industrial conditions.

And they run it again.

They see if they can replicate the event.

And it sounds simple, but it's really great, it's really good science.

And by doing this, they're able to say, "Oh no, this event was not about loaded dice, this event was caused by higher levels of CO2.

And that's in fact what they found with the 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest.

They could say with, you know, real scientific certainty that this event was impossible without the higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

So, we're being able to say, "No, this event was some, not all events.

They do these on some events and they say "No, this is in the range of natural cycles as we can't say this was caused, but some events, an increasing number, we can say that it was caused by it.

And so the implications of this are enormous Because then you begin to say, "Okay, well if this event was caused by higher levels of CO2, then who is responsible for putting the higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and should they be at all responsible for the consequences and damages of this?

And this is one reason why an increasing number of climate activists and others in this movement have been talking about, for example, the oil industry as not being dissimilar to the tobacco industry 'cause they have a long history of funding questionable science, of spreading misinformation in a similar way to what the tobacco industry did.

And now, we have found something like a linkage, a kind of smoking gun between the events and the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

So it has big legal and political implications and that kind of financial implications actually.

And that's why I think in the world this year, there's been over 1500 lawsuits filed, climate lawsuits filed against governments and against, you know, some of the big oil companies because of this attribution of science.

- Hey Jeff, we've got literally about a minute left here.

I'm wondering though, can you talk to us a little bit about, you know, the future of progress on a global scale, on a national scale.

We're taping this the morning after election day 2024 in the United States, and there's a lot of, you know, shaking out that needs to happen.

But what's the future of climate policy on a warming heating up planet at the end of 2024?

- Well, I mean, that's a very big question and a very difficult question given the results of this election.

You know, we've just elected a president who explicitly says that he believes that climate change is a hoax, right?

And so, I think it's pretty fair to say that we're not going to see aggressive action on this, on shifting to renewable power more quickly, on all the kind of adaptation changes and things that we need to make as sea levels rise and the kinds of things that we need to do to protect vulnerable people.

I don't think that's going to be a priority in the United States, certainly in the near term.

But, you know, part of me thinks, "Well, you know, maybe this will galvanize people to really understand what's at stake."

Because the real simple truth is that, you know, the climate doesn't care who won the election, right?

If we keep burning fossil fuels and putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, we are going to create a hotter and hotter and more and more chaotic world.

And what the political and economic and financial implications of that are, you know, really difficult to understand, to think clearly about.

I think it is very clear that the UN target of 1.5 sea of warming from pre-industrial, which was the sort of threshold that was set up during the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, that is gone.

I think even the two degree limit is probably gone.

So, we're into a different world now.

- That is a sobering place to leave it.

The book is, "The Heat Will Kill You First."

Jeff Goodell, thank you for spending some time with us.

That's all the time we have this week.

If you wanna know more about "Story in The Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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