“If You Get Too Hot, You Will Die”

What I wanted to really communicate is the immediacy of heat and the immediate dangers and risks of heat. We talk a lot about climate change, and we talk a lot about the different impacts. My previous book was about sea level rise, and that’s a really significant thing that is changing the boundaries of the land and the sea and having massive implications for coastal cities around the world. But no one’s going to stand on the beach and die because a glacier is melting in Antarctica. It’s not going to happen in real time. Heat will. You can go for a walk on a hot day, and if you’re not careful and you don’t know what you’re doing, and if you get stuck in a really hot place or you have any kind of medical conditions or you run out of water—all kinds of things can go wrong—you can die. And people do die all the time.

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Heat is democratic in the sense that all living things have this thermal range that they can deal with. And it doesn’t matter if you have $100 million in the bank or if you have no money. It doesn’t matter if you’re living at the equator or the North Pole. If you get too hot, you will die. And so heat is very democratic in that sense, but it’s also democratic in the sense that it’s not just outdoor workers and things now. If it’s 115 degrees and very humid, you don’t have to spend a lot of time outdoors or be stuck in that kind of environment to die.

A lot of people say, “Oh, well, it’s no big deal. We have air conditioning. We’ll be fine.” Well, you’re not fine, because what happens if the power goes out? Here in Texas, we had a five-day power outage a couple of winters ago. I was here for that. If the same kind of thing happened during a heat wave in a major city, thousands of people will die. It will be what one infrastructure expert in my book described as a “heat Katrina,” referring to Hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans a few years ago.