The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

The Heat Will Kill You First belongs to the burgeoning genre of climate change-related nonfiction, yet it diverges even from these calls for action in the immediacy of its arguments. In recent years, books like Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction and David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth have shaped climate literature by calling attention to the urgent and catastrophic impacts of global warming. Both books stress the seriousness of the problem, but they approach it from a broad perspective, exploring how climate change reshapes ecosystems and threatens human civilization on a large scale. Their impact has been to show readers the enormous and interconnected consequences of climate change, raising awareness and calling for action to address these complex challenges. Goodell aims to do something related and yet distinct by personalizing the climate crisis.

Wallace-Wells, for instance, discusses global-scale climate threats, writing about the potential for extreme heat, food shortages, economic collapse, and mass migrations if climate change continues unchecked. This puts the emphasis on the future, not the present. Goodell, by contrast, focuses on how climate change is already impacting people at an individual and community level, making his arguments all the more relevant to readers’ lives.