Jeff Goodell

This sense of incrementalism also holds true with the climate crisis.

Who can tell the difference between a 77-degree day and an 81-degree day?

In pop culture, hot is sexy. Hot is cool. Hot is new. Websites publish “hot lists” of the latest books, movies, TV shows, and actors.

Heat is an expression of passion—you feel hot for the guy at the bar or engage him in a heated debate

The kind of heat I’m talking about here is not an incremental bump on the thermometer or the slow slide of spring into summer. It is heat as an active force, one that can bend railroad tracks and kill you before you even understand that your life is at risk.

Heat lowers children’s test scores and raises the risk of miscarriage in pregnant women.

The eight years between 2015 and 2022 were the hottest on record. In 2022, 850 million people lived in regions that experienced all-time high temperatures.

Water is necessary to keep sweat flowing. If you get dehydrated, you can’t sweat.

To understand the power of heat, you have to think of it not just as a change in temperature, but as an evolutionary hurdle. Heat management is a survival tool for all life on Earth, and the strategies to deal with it are as diverse and colorful as the animal kingdom itself.

This phenomenon, known to city planners and heat researchers as the urban heat island effect, is so pervasive that climate skeptics once claimed that climate change is merely an illusion created by thousands of once-rural meteorological stations becoming surrounded by urban development (the argument, like most arguments pushed by climate skeptics, has been thoroughly debunked)