We've been warned it would be like this, the effects of climate change, shifting from isolated events to what feels like constant chaos.

Just this summer, Americans have coped with choking smoke from Canadian wildfires,

a hurricane that threatened Southern California, many weeks of relentless triple-digit highs across

much of the southwest, and the specter of people running into the ocean to survive a fire that

devoured Maui's most historic town.

From KERA in Dallas, this is Think.

I'm Chris Boyd.

As hard as it is these days to deny that climate change is happening,

my guest thinks we might still need a wake-up call

about the way this new normal will change human existence as we have known it.

We may not be able to quickly reverse those effects, but if we have a realistic understanding of how people are being affected,

we can address the ways economic inequality magnifies the damage. Jeff Goodell is a 2020

Guggenheim fellow, and his New York Times best-selling new book is called The Heat Will Kill You First, Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.

Jeff, welcome to think.

Hi there. Nice to be here.

This has been such a brutal summer across so much of the Northern Hemisphere.

For some reason, I have to tell you, the thought of Maui on fire, this place that, you know,

a lot of us associate with like lush tropical growth and constant rain, this felt like

a different kind of line being crossed. And I'm starting to wonder, Jeff, if summer is going

to start to be a season that most humans dread rather than look forward to. Yeah, I think that's, you know, a really big and important question.

I mean, it's certainly true that as our planet warms up and as summers get more and more brutal,

the whole idea of summer changes, especially here in the northern hemisphere.

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