The opening chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson's amazing climate catastrophe scifi novel, The Ministry for the Future (Susan and I have both read it but I haven't reflected on it here yet) describes an indescribably horrifying heat wave in India that causes more than a million deaths. The opening chapter of Goodell's book offers instead a single story, no less terrifying: a young couple who set out with their infant daughter and their dog for a morning walk in the Sierra Nevada foothills, do not return, and are all eventually found dead of heatstroke and dehydration, on a hot day (upper 90s), on trails exposed to direct sun as a result of wildfires that burned off the forest cover. This sets the stage for an extraordinary overview of recent trends in global temperature, ocean levels, polar ice caps, and more. A chapter traces the evolution of heat-regulating mechanisms in living things; another describes the urban heat islands where every inhabited structure needs air conditioning, boosting the outdoor temperature even further. He recounts the extraordinary and deadly heatwave in the Pacific Northwest that buckled roads and killed off sea life by overheating the ocean. He reminds us of the enormous death toll, overwhelming mortuaries and cemetaries, resulting from the heat wave that brought Paris to its knees in 2003. The picture is not entirely devoid of hope: activists and even some governments are beginning to take action to push catastrophic temperatures and sea levels a bit farther into the future, trees are being planted, solar arrays constructed, rooftop gardens installed on new housing in some European cities.
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