Hi, it's Diane. On my mind, heat. July 2023 was the hottest month on record. The

warmest eight years on the planet have all occurred since 2015.

There's no other climate-related event that is as dangerous to life as heat.

That's journalist Jeff Gidell. His new book is titled The Heat Will Kill You First, Life

and Death on a scorched planet. In it, he offers readers a new understanding of heat and

the impact that rising temperatures will have on our lives. After a summer of wildfires

in Maui, tropical storms in California and strings of 100 plus days in the southwest, I wanted

to talk with Jeff about what he learned writing his book and how hot is too hot.

Jeff, we're seeing just a number of hurricanes, the latest Adelia, moving up the

southeastern coast today. I'm hearing how heat is specifically unprecedented in the oceans.

Tell us why that's happening and what that means for our climate in general.

Yeah, so, you know, the hurricane that we're seeing that has just hit the coast of Florida has been

driven in over the Gulf over extremely warm waters, record-breaking warms, and it's been

well-established that, you know, hotter oceans intensify hurricanes. The hurricanes are essentially

heat engines that work off the sort of differentials of heat between the air temperature and the

water temperature, and hotter sea surface temperatures kind of supercharge these hurricanes.

And we've seen unprecedented heat in the oceans this summer, record-breaking heat. It was,

in fact, a hundred degrees Fahrenheit in Biscayne Bay earlier this year, which is just practically

hot-top temperatures. What is it normally? What's the temperature normally? In the 70s and 80s.

Oh, I see. 70s, high 70s. So it's really abnormal to see these kinds of temperatures.

And you know, the reason that the oceans are heating up in general is because the oceans act as

kind of a kind of thermal sink for the warmth that is being trapped by these rising CO2 levels

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