Hard Facts About Our Climate Future

From wildfires to the melting of ice sheets, Jeff Goodell’s new book documents the ways that extreme heat is threatening life on earth

HERE’S THE THING Jeff Goodell wants you to understand about the climate crisis: “Heat is an extinction force.” Goodell, who has been reporting on climate change for more than two decades, highlighted the real possibility of a heat apocalypse with his 2019 Rolling Stone feature “Can We Survive Extreme Heat?” That story began with a trip to Phoenix — one of the United States’ hottest cities — where he saw the damage being done to infrastructure and communities in stark, firsthand terms. “It was born on a 115-degree day when I was walking in downtown Phoenix,” Goodell recalls. “I thought I was going to die.” His new book, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet (Little, Brown and Company), expands that story along with several other pieces drawn from Goodell’s tireless climate reporting for Rolling Stone, including his 2019 trip to Antarctica’s socalled Doomsday Glacier; his 2020 look at the warming of the Pacific Ocean; a 2022 story about the worsening global food crisis; and “Sebastian Perez Did Not Have to Die,” his 2021 feature about the Guatemalan-born farmworker who was tragically killed by a heat wave in Oregon. For Goodell, all of these sobering stories serve an urgent public need. “There hasn’t been much thinking or writing about the actual effects of extreme heat on our bodies and on all the world around us,” he says. But the consequences of extreme heat on our planet can’t be ignored for long. Goodell adds, “You’ve just got to look at Venus to see where this ends.”