The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, by Jeff Goodell. Little Brown & Company, New York, 2023.

Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, by John Vaillant. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2023.

As I write this, a massive heat dome is blanketing much of the United States. Even here in normally cool Vermont, the heat index this week has exceeded 100°F. This makes Jeff Goodell’s 2023 book, The Heat Will Kill You First, especially relevant.

Goodell, who also wrote the excellent 2017 book, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World, takes the reader on a journey that illustrates the realities—and severity—of rising temperatures. The book starts in the Pacific Northwest in the summer of 2021, where extraordinarily high temperatures far surpassed existing records and over 1,000 people were killed.

We hear tragic stories, like that of a young, healthy family that perished (along with their dog) on a day hike in California’s Sierra Nevada foothills in August 2021. Through this story, Goodell explains what heatstroke is and how it advances in extreme conditions—and how even copious intake of water may not save you. We learn about evolutionary adaptations to heat—by human ancestors and other members of the animal kingdom. Urban heat islands—elevated air temperatures from pavement, buildings, and air conditioning in urban areas—are explained with examples from Phoenix and Chennai, India.

One chapter covers migration as an adaptation to heat. This is a common strategy in the animal kingdom and is increasingly occurring with humans in some parts of the world. Ironically, though, in the U.S., while there is steady migration away from areas highly vulnerable to flooding, there remains a significant net migration toward hotter places. “People are moving away from storms and towards heat,” notes Goodell.

The impact of a warming planet on agriculture and food production is the subject of another chapter. A recent study is cited claiming that world food production today is 21% lower than it would be without climate change. Heat changes the timing of blooming (and pollination) and increases vulnerability to plant diseases and fungus. Donald Ort, a professor of plant biology at the University of Illinois, is quoted saying that “the largest single global change that threatens food security is high temperature.”

Outdoor workers in agriculture, landscaping, and construction are highly vulnerable to extreme temperature. The policy debates about the need for laws to protect outdoor workers that are described in the book have been in the news the past few weeks as state and federal legislators consider laws to protect worker health. (So far, most of those measures have been blocked by anti-regulatory legislators, but the push for such legislation will likely grow stronger as extreme heat events become more common.)

Included in the book are clear explanations of the greenhouse effect, discussion of the influence of ocean currents, and the history of technologies like refrigerant air conditioning that are keeping us safe during extreme heat events. We also learn about the emerging field of extreme event attribution—which is the science of attributing storms and other impacts directly to climate change. Attributing extreme events to climate change will doubtless play out in the courts in the years ahead.

Goodell’s research on extreme heat took him to Antarctica, where he talked with glaciologists about the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica—which he had nicknamed The Doomsday Glacier in a 2017 Rolling Stone article. Scientists are trying to understand the glacier and its impact on global sea levels. “How close West Antarctica is to collapse,” Goodell writes, “is one of the most urgent and consequential questions of our time. A stable West Antarctic ice sheet means coastal cities around the world will likely have time to adapt to rising seas. An unstable West Antarctic ice sheet means goodbye Miami—and virtually every other low-lying coastal city in the world.”

While The Heat Will Kill You First is a troubling book, it is very well written and it the perfect companion to a fan and a cold iced tea on the back porch this summer. If I have any criticism of the book it is only that not enough is said about measures to minimize risk, such as design for passive survivability that has been championed by the Resilient Design Institute.

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Fire Weather by John Vaillant focuses on another aspect of a changing climate: fire. Also highly readable, much of the book focuses on the May 2016 Fort McMurray Fire in northern Alberta, which lasted months, drove 88,000 people from their homes, and temporarily shut down the Alberta oil sands operation there.

Part One of the book provides fascinating background on the oil industry and the hard-to-extract oil sands (also known as bitumen or tar sands) that underlie the boreal forest of northern Alberta—almost 300 miles north of Edmonton. The area had been largely uninhabited prior to the discovery of oil sands, but now is a bustling, wealthy city. We learn the fascinating story of how this stretch of wilderness was transformed into a northern-Alberta version of Houston. Extraction of usable, flowable crude oil from oil sands isn’t easy—or cheap—requiring huge amounts of energy to process.

Part Two is the real heart of the book, telling the dramatic story of the Fort McMurray Fire that really re-defined fires. Vaillant is a masterful story teller who provides an amazing account of this fire and the miraculous response that resulted in zero fatalities, despite the loss of whole neighborhoods and long lines of traffic evacuating through active fire conditions—temperatures in excess of 150°F were recorded in vehicle interiors during the evacuations.

What began as a wildfire on May 1^st was a raging urban fire engulfing the city of Fort McMurray two days later. The fire burned in the city out-of-control for more than eight days and was still burning in places for three weeks. By mid-June, 2016 the wildfire outside the city had burned 2,300 square miles of boreal forest—an area larger than the state of Delaware. The Fort McMurray Fire would not be declared fully extinguished until August 2, 2017, 15 months after it began!

Fire Weather tells a story of extremes. It was the first time when urban fire breaks were created the same way forest firebreaks are created to stop wildfires. Massive excavators and bulldozers in Fort McMurray (the oil-sand extraction city is flush with heavy equipment) were used to crush rows of houses, flattening them and pushing the resident F-350 pickups and Mercedes SUVs into the basements to try to stem the fire’s spread.

It is a story of heroism by the firefighters and emergency personnel. While recognition of the danger from the storm during the record-warm spring was slow to emerge, full evacuation orders eventually emerged—and were remarkably effective. Fire Weather tells this remarkable story.

The final section of the book, Reckoning, addresses fire—and the relatively new concept of fire weather—in the context of climate change. An excellent history of our understanding of climate change is presented, starting in 1856, when a woman suffragist and citizen scientist from Upstate New York, Eunice Newton Foote, carried out what may have been the first experiment showing that carbon dioxide trapped heat. “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature,” she wrote in a short article that was reported at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held that August.

Though I’ve followed the debate about climate change since the early-1970s as a Junior High School student, Vaillant’s narrative of the unfolding awareness of climate change throughout the 1900s was eye-opening. Of particular interest was the role of the petroleum industry, which in the mid-1960s commissioned studies on climate change and the role of their industry in it. The American Petroleum Institute (API) created the CO2 and Climate Task Force to look into these issues. But that task force was disbanded in the mid-‘80s and replaced with the Global Climate Coalition to obfuscate the science and cast doubt on what their scientists knew to be true about climate change.

This discussion of climate change is brought back to the Fort McMuray Fire and other major wildfires that have occurred in the years since.

While Fire Weather tells a troubling story about fire and climate change, it is a fast read. Both it and The Heat Will Kill You First will add immeasurably to the discussions about what we will increasingly deal with as climate change advances in the years ahead.

Read these books and talk about them.

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Along with founding the Resilient Design Institute in 2012, Alex is founder of BuildingGreen, Inc. To keep up with his latest articles and musings, you can sign up for his Twitter feed. To receive e-mail notices of new blogs, sign up at the top of the page.