Front Burner - ‘The Heat Will Kill You First’

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

Floods, fires, storms and droughts are all upending lives around the globe. And at the centre of it all is a warming planet. Heat – is the driving force. We are living through the Earth’s hottest month on record. Extreme heat has led to flash floods and property destruction in northern Italy and the Balkans, and fueled wildfires in Croatia and Greece. Nova Scotia’s dealing with historic flooding, much of B-C is engulfed in wildfires and parts of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Yukon and the Northwest territories are under heat warnings. Our guest today warns: heat and the chaos it can unleash is serious and often deadly. Jeff Goodell is a climate reporter and contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine. He’s also the author of the book The Heat will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Tamara Kandaker. Brutally high temperatures are making their way across the globe. Scorching temperatures have gripped three of the world's continents, Asia, Europe and North America. We are living through Earth's hottest month on record.

There have been times when you turn on the news and it almost feels like the reports are trying to one up each other. Each one more alarming than the last. China did record its hottest day, the mercury hitting 52.2 degrees. This is Italy, where there are warnings that the extreme heat could continue for a further 10 days. Over 88 million Americans from coast to coast under excessive heat warnings and advisories. Last week, extreme heat led to flash floods and property destruction in northern Italy and the Balkans and fueled wildfires in Croatia and Greece, prompting the government to start the largest evacuation effort in the country's history. Here in Canada, Nova Scotia is dealing with historic flooding this weekend, caused by what Premier Tim Houston described as three months worth of rain in less than 24 hours.

It came fast and it came furious. And it's left a mark in many ways. While much of B.C., which is dealing with hundreds of active wildfires, and parts of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories are under heat warnings from Environment Canada. Nanaimo has no rain in the forecast, so people are being urged to conserve water. If a fire catches under these circumstances, it will move fast, and that's scary. As heat waves become more frequent and extreme, one thing is becoming clear. Heat is more than just an inconvenience or a temporary discomfort.

It's reshaping our world in fundamental ways. It's dictating our movements, impacting our food supply, and spreading disease. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. What these rising temperatures are doing to us and the earth and whether there's anything we can do about it. My guest is Jeff Goodell. He's a climate reporter and contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine. He's also the author of the book, The Heat Will Kill You First, Life and Death on a scorched planet. Hi, Jeff. Thanks for being here.

Hi, happy to be here. Jeff, I want to start in Phoenix. It's been under an excessive heat warning the last few weeks. And you've written about how you were inspired to write this book after you took a walk in Phoenix under those conditions. Can you describe that day to me and tell me what that kind of heat feels like and what it does to the body? You know, this was four years ago. And I had been writing about climate change at that time for more than a decade. It wasn't like I was naive about heat, but I'd never really thought about it in a kind of personal way, nor the sort of larger sort of macro today when the temperature was something around 44 C or somewhere in there. And I was staying downtown at a hotel and I had a 10 or 12 block walk to get to my next meeting. And naturally, I just thought I would walk. And I just went out the door of the hotel and was hit by this wall of heat that was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. And by the time I got to the

end of this 12 block walk, you know, my heart was pounding. I was feeling dizzy. I was realized that this heat was scary and this heat was dangerous. And I had never, it had never occurred to me before about how risky it was to go out in this kind of conditions. And for me, that was the beginning of this book, the beginning of thinking about heat in a serious way. Up until then, I didn't know kind of even what heat was. I knew, of course, what temperature was, but I didn't actually know what heat was. And that began this journey for me. temperature was, but I didn't actually know what heat was. And that began this journey for me.

So Jeff, throughout the book, there are all these stories of people of all different kinds of backgrounds and ages and fitness levels who end up succumbing to heat and die. There's this young family of three on a hike in Yosemite. There's a 38-year-old migrant worker on a farm in Oregon. And the reason it's so scary to read these stories is because most people, I think, believe that if they're relatively young and healthy, extreme heat is not going to kill them. Am I right about that? Do you think most people tend to overestimate their ability to adapt to extreme heat? people tend to overestimate their ability to adapt to extreme heat? Absolutely. We, meaning most people who think about this at all, drastically underestimate the risks of extreme heat. That's one of the reasons why these sort of higher and higher temperatures are more and more concerning because it's one thing to go out on a, you know, 40 C day. It's a quite

another thing to go out on a 45 or 46 C day because, you know, our bodies have these thermal limits that we can tolerate. Our bodies are really good at, you know, we, we have a cooling mechanism, you know, it's, which is called sweat and everyone knows that. And our bodies can manage changes in temperatures to a certain level. But once they get beyond that level, you get in trouble really quickly. Heat may have led to the death of a local man in Death Valley. The 71-year-old from Los Angeles collapsed outside a restroom yesterday when the temperature was 121 degrees. Emergency responders tried CPR but were not able to save him. National Park officials... I should point out that yes, if you're young and healthy, you can still be impacted. Everyone is

vulnerable, but certain people are more vulnerable than others. People who are older, people who have any kind of heart or circulatory conditions, people who are young, young children, pregnant women, people who are on certain kinds of medications like diuretics or beta blockers. So there is, you know, some people are more vulnerable than others to these kinds of conditions. What about this idea that people from hotter parts of the world are better able to handle heat? Is there any truth to that? Well, yes and no. So there's truth to that? Well, yes and no. So there's truth to that in the sense that people from hotter parts of the world understand

heat better and are good at kind of cultural changes that allow them to manage the heat, like siestas, right? The idea of a siesta, you take a break in the middle of the day. right the idea of a siesta you take a break in the middle of the day um places understand how to manage heat better but there's no difference in our bodies right if you've lived in the philippines for 10 generations and have had have grown up and your ancestors have grown up in really hot climates or you've lived for 10 generations in al Alaska and your ancestors have been in a very cold climate for a long time, your body is, they're identical. There's no difference in how we manage heat. And that was part of, you know, there's a kind of racism that undercuts a lot of

this, you know, here in Texas, you know, there's a unspoken, but not inarticulated idea that, oh, the guys who are working on the asphalt streets on these hot summer days or on rooftops when it's really hot, they're Mexicans, they're used to it. It's no big deal. And it's not true. Right. So our bodies experience heat the same, but not everyone's equally exposed to the dangers of heat, like the workers that you mentioned in Austin. And that inequality, you can see it even between neighborhoods in the same city, and you write about this in the book. What were some of the most stark examples of inequality that you came across in your reporting? Well, I mean, one example is right here in Austin, Texas, where I live.

You know, the more affluent neighborhoods have big oak trees, you know, shady green spaces, parks, things like that. You go over to the east side of the city where there's been a history of redlining, kind of, you know, where they've moved black and brown communities into these regions as the city has gentrified. You know, there are very few trees there. The houses are more poorly insulated. Many people who live there don't have access to air conditioning. And Austin's not unique. You know, I felt this very powerfully, for example, in Mexico City. Mexico City, the urban neighborhoods and the wealthy neighborhoods have big, beautiful trees and paths and through gardens and parks and

everything. And then you go out to the outskirts and it's just, you know, concrete shacks and concrete buildings and asphalt. And it's just this sort of oven in these communities. And so it's really true that, you know, wealth buys coolness. And I think that's pretty much a universal truth around the world. New research into BC's deadly heat dome found that poverty was the biggest risk factor. More than 600 people died over about a week in 2021. Temperatures hit more than 40 degrees in Chilliwack during the heat dome. Q Lawrence gets by on disability assistance. They couldn't afford air conditioning.

Other people talk about the things they're excited for summer. They talk about going swimming, going to the beach. I think about who in my community is going to die. At the very beginning of the book, you write about what scientists call the Goldilocks zone. That's the temperature that living things can survive at. And if it goes up or down too much, too fast, they die. And earlier this week, the heat index near the Persian Gulf International Airport in Iran, it ran over 66 degrees Celsius, which is considered to be higher than what the human body can withstand. I'm wondering, where else in the world are we reaching that tipping point of leaving the Goldilocks zone? Well, you know, throughout many,

there's many parts of Asia that, you know, Pakistan, India are approaching those points. Some places in Indonesia, frankly, some places here in northern Mexico and the southeastern United States, we get into those ranges. The city of Phoenix set a new record today by hitting 110 degrees or more for the 19th straight day, and there is no end in sight.

There have been nearly 700 heat-related emergency calls in the Phoenix area for June and July alone. You know, one of the things that's really important to think about in understanding these ideas of like what the limits are is the difference between wet heat and dry heat so a lot of these places that are beginning to get on this threshold of survivability and again that threshold is a very loose term because it depends on who you are and what you're doing and if you're sitting or if you're moving you know any kind of exercise increases heat load and things like that but also heat, it tends to be far more dangerous than dry heat because our only mechanism for cooling off is sweating. And then when it's a hot, humid day and there's a lot of moisture in the air,

your sweat has a much more difficult time evaporating. And most people know this. They've been to a hot, humid place and you feel like you're sitting in a pool of sweat because the sweat doesn't evaporate. So when it can't evaporate, your cooling system doesn't work. And those kinds of conditions are much more dangerous. When it comes to the consequences of the Earth getting hotter, what tends to get a lot of attention are natural disasters like floods and wildfires.

And for good reason. And in Canada, for example, the wildfire season this year has been really bad on both coasts. But what I wanted to spend a bit of time on is climate migration. We're already seeing millions of people on the move in Southeast Asia, the African Sahel, and places like Pakistan, which was recently hit by flooding and saw 15% of its population displaced. How much of that has to do with heat? Heat is a major driver in a lot of this. And I mean heat in two ways. So there's the extreme

heat, the temperatures that we've been talking about, you know, the 44, 45, 46 C when it becomes these heat waves that are just too hot to handle and people begin to move around. But then there's also just the sort of broader, you know, as our planet gets hotter and hotter, it is heat that is driving all of these other climate impacts that cause migration, right? So things like drought and sea level rise in Bangladesh, for example, is a big driver and people migrating out of coastal areas in Bangladesh and eventually places like Miami. You know, I've described carbon dioxide as a kind of element of planetary chaos, because as it gets hotter and we load the air with CO2, we're going to get more and more people moving around, more and more migration. And with that comes conflict, political tensions, a lot of, frankly, things like war. I mean, it's really not a recipe for a stable world.

Yeah. The other thing I feel like is worth mentioning is that heat is already exacerbating food shortages around the world, right? Like in sub-Saharan Africa, for example. Absolutely. I mean, in my reporting in the book, I went to the Rio Grande Valley here in Texas, which is one of the most agriculturally productive regions in the United States. And there, the temperatures are getting so hot that a number of the of the important crops there corn for example are reaching their thermal limits and you know when it's when we have these extreme heat waves we get major crop damage a major corn is essentially burned and dies and when you think about that in

places like the sahel and in places where the food infrastructure is even more fragile, the consequences of that are enormous. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know

their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. So we are seeing a lot of migration and we're going to see more migration. But the thing is, hotter temperatures are also going to make it more difficult for people to move. And you point to that in the book, you write about a place called the Devil's Passage, which is a section of the US Mexico border. Can you tell me about that? Yeah, so, you know, I was very interested in, you know, migration, as we discussed. And I live here in Texas, and I wanted to go down to the border and meet with and describe some of these migrants who are moving out of,

in this case, Central America, where it's been very hot and where there's all kinds of climate consequences. People coming to the United States, trying to find jobs, trying to find a new and cooler, more stable place to live. The passage across the U.S. border is, of course, very fraught, and there's a lot of politics around that. And a lot of these migrants are, for a variety of reasons that are not worth going into here,

are funneled through this area called the Devil's Passage, which is this 70-mile stretch of Chihuahua desert at the Mexico, Texas border. I mean, Mexico, Arizona border, that is extraordinarily hot. And I went out there with some, with some humanitarian workers who were, you know, leaving water dropped in the, in the, in this desert for these migrants who came across. And it was a very moving and disturbing experience because I was warned to watch where I stepped because there

were so many human bones there from people who had died and just been left in the desert. Yeah, that's horrifying. And then on the flip side, you have tourists actually going to places like Death Valley to experience the heat there. While climate scientists and health authorities are ringing the alarm, visitors to California's Death Valley are rooting for temperatures to keep rising, just enough to melt a century-old record. If you look at the top temperatures on record, Death Valley is all over that list. And so if you experience the top temperatures here, you're maybe experiencing that world record,

which is really exciting for many folks. It seems like that just speaks to the fact that people don't realize how dangerous it is and that they're not taking it seriously enough. Yeah, so these tourists now are going to Death Valley and they're going there, getting their pictures taken next to this digital thermometer that is showing these, you know, 130 degree Fahrenheit temperatures. You know, it's extreme. They're like, it's a kind of adventurism. They clearly don't understand the risks that they're running. I think some of them, you know, there's also this sort of, and I feel this in Texas, there's this sort of heat macho culture.

Like, you know, I'm tougher than heat. You know, I can, I'm not afraid of heat. Heat's just this sort of, you know, weak thing. And I'm a tough guy. I think there's some of that. I think there's some people who are trying to say that, you know, climate change is no big deal. Look at this, I can handle 130 degree heat. You know, it's a very bizarre phenomenon that I actually really don't know how to explain except to say that it is really stupid because

messing around with heat will kill you. So it's not only humans that are migrating as a result of climate change. It's also animals, which brings me to another chapter of the book that I think people might find really disturbing given what we just collectively went through with COVID. You write about how the heat could impact the spread of disease. Tell me about what scientists are worried about here. Well, you know, as we know from COVID and all the discussion about where COVID came from, and, you know, we know it, you know, it originally came from an animal, probably a bat. We wouldn't,

you know, that was the sort of original reservoir for COVID. And animals are reservoirs for all kinds of diseases and microbes and pathogens that don't do them any harm, but can do us a lot of harm. And so as things like bats begin moving around, they begin having interactions with other animals, people. We've come in contact with things that we have not had contact before, that our bodies do not have any kind of protection against, you know, any antibodies and things. I mean, a simple and perfect example of this is mosquitoes, right? Mosquitoes move around. They're very sensitive to temperature.

to temperature. As they move into new regions, they're carrying diseases like dengue fever, Zika, and most dangerously, malaria, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. But even here in the U.S., we've seen the first re-emergence of malaria a couple of weeks ago. And so, you know, as these creatures move around, they're bringing stuff with them that, you know, we don't want and are very dangerous. And so it's an aspect of heat that people don't think about much. So we've talked about how there's still a lot of ignorance about the dangers of extreme heat and what to do when you're dealing with it. And you've written in the book about the challenges of communicating about heat. Are there things we need to change about the way that we talk about and report on it? Yeah, I mean, the answer to that is yes, there are things we need to need to do to change how we write and report about it. I mean, heat is a difficult thing to grasp because, first of all, because it's invisible like a hurricane where you see pictures of, you know, palm trees bending in half and roofs

flying off houses, very visual, very dramatic and prints yourself on your imagination. You know, heat is an invisible force. You don't, you can, I'm looking out my window right now here in Austin and looking at my window, it would look exactly the same if it were 30 C or 50 C. You cannot see it, right? Until I walk out into it, then you feel it. And, you know, the media has done a very poor job of kind of talking about and communicating this risk, right? So when it's hot out, we tend to look at images, our television stations and web stuff tends to show images of, you know, kids playing in sprinklers or, you know, crowded beaches. San Diego beaches could experience some of the worst crowding they've seen in years. And it's not because of the holiday weekend, but it's also because people are flocking to the beach to escape extreme heat temperatures.

Now, earlier today, we talked to some... So there's this, you know, kind of subtle kind of feeling that, oh, it's just a little bit warmer. Let's just go to the beach and go to the lake. It'll kind of be okay. And until now, I think people are now beginning to understand because of these heat waves and because the temperatures are getting so high that heat is the most deadly, you know, force in all of this. Climate impacts kills far more people than any other kind of natural disaster. And we're profoundly uneducated about it. So to wrap up here, Jeff, you've painted a really vivid picture of the climate crisis. And it was kind of hard at times reading the book, understanding the damage that we've already done,

And it was kind of hard at times reading the book, understanding the damage that we've already done and to not feel a sense of impending doom. But you've also highlighted a lot of work, a lot of the work of activists and climate scientists and engineers and people who are actively fighting this issue. And I wonder if you can leave us with something that you came across in your reporting that made you feel like this battle isn't lost yet? Well, I don't think it's lost at all. I mean, I think the opposite of that. I think that, you know, there are a lot of solutions that I've seen out there in the world, whether it is, you know, simply, you know, people who are, you know, implementing a, there's a micro insurance program that I learned about in India that is, that is paying women to not go to work on really hot days, so they don't put their lives in jeopardy. And so they don't lose income. I mean, there's all kinds of simple solutions from, you know, planting trees to, you know, changing the laws about air conditioning shutoffs to energy innovation and efficiency. But the big message that I would like to end with is this idea that not only are we not doomed, I think that we are in a moment of profound transformation.

There are many solutions out there. There are many things that we can do. There are many changes that are coming. The reason, you know, as you mentioned, there's moments of my book that are hard to read. It is true because I think that in order to consider these solutions, we have to also consider the scope and scale of what we really face. This is not, we need to put a bandaid on a cut on our finger or put a cast on a broken ankle. We have to fundamentally rethink how we live, where we live, where we get our power, where we get our food, understand these risks better. And if we do that, I think we have a tremendous opportunity

to build a better, healthier, cleaner world. That's a great place to end. Jeff, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. All right, that's all for today. I'm Tamara Kandaker. Thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you tomorrow. Thank you.