The summer of 2025 has been a season of climate-driven catastrophes: wildfires in Turkey, flooding in China and the U.S., and fatally high heat across Europe. This series of events points to the increasing ferocity of extreme weather—the storms, droughts, floods, fires, and heat waves that, as global warming accelerates, have become more severe and more unpredictable. (Today, scientists speak not only of storms but also “mega rains,” not only of dry spells but also “flash droughts.”) This week, the New Yorker writers Elizabeth Kolbert, Bill McKibben, and Rivka Galchen recommend three books, each one focussed on a different aspect of our rapidly changing climate.
The Heat Will Kill You First
by Jeff Goodell
Goodell’s book was first published in July, 2023. This turned out to be the hottest month on record until July, 2024, which was warmer still. July, 2025, has, of course, also been a scorcher—since it’s not yet over, its rank is unclear—and in recent weeks I’ve often thought about Goodell’s deeply informative book. It covers a lot of ground, exploring topics such as the effects of extreme heat on the human body, the impacts of marine heat waves on ocean life, and the invention of air-conditioning (which was first used to prevent printing paper from warping). Extreme heat is already “remaking our planet,” Goodell observes, and, he warns, things are only going to get hotter: “Even if we transition fairly quickly to clean energy, half of the world’s human population will be exposed to life-threatening combinations of heat and humidity by 2100.” —Elizabeth Kolbert
Storms of My Grandchildren
by James Hansen
The climatologist James Hansen is the Paul Revere of climate change, having warned the world in congressional testimony delivered in June, 1988, that fossil-fuel emissions were warming the planet. (He also survived several Presidential attempts to fire him from his job leading the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a collaboration between Columbia University and NASA, before retiring, only to see DOGE shut down its office on the Upper West Side this spring.) He has always had a visceral feel for how the planet responds to forces that change its energy balance, including, most notably, the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that results from burning fossil fuel. Part of that feel is based not on present-day research but on paleoclimatology, and, in “Storms of My Grandchildren,” Hansen uses past performance to predict future returns. In the book, which was published fifteen years ago, Hansen writes that “once ice sheet disintegration begins in earnest, our grandchildren will live the rest of their lives in a chaotic transition period”—and the intervening years have not been kind to the frozen poles. —Bill McKibben
Running Out
by Lucas Bessire
Bessire’s transfixing book about the Ogallala Aquifer, the expanses of which flow below the Great Plains’ fields of silky corn and golden wheat, is a reminder that extreme weather aboveground has a less visible sequel underground. After the drought years of the Dust Bowl, the government began subsidizing irrigation projects, and many more acres of the Midwest were turned into farmland, leading to an increasing amount of water being drawn from the aquifer. This was a reasonable solution, even one to celebrate, when the rate of water taken from the aquifer did not exceed the rate of its replenishment. But in many parts of the Plains today, that balance is not held; the aquifer, which would take six thousand years to refill, is projected to be more than two-thirds empty within the next fifty years. An anthropologist at the University of Oklahoma, Bessire comes from a family that has been farming and ranching in Kansas for five generations, and his book combines geographic, personal, historical, and political inquiry to show how stories of surface water and stories of groundwater can be thought of as chapters of the same epic—in which responses to one environmental derangement, often abetted by humans, bring about another. A singular and wondrous book, “Running Out” is at once knowledgeable and tender, searching and uncertain. —Rivka Galchen
