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This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

My name is Jeff Goodell. I’m a climate journalist, and I’m the author most recently of a “New York Times” bestseller called “The Heat Will Kill You First, Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.”

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I’ve been writing about climate change for more than 20 years. And it wasn’t until 2018 — I can tell you exactly the moment — when I was in Phoenix doing some reporting for an entirely different story. It was 115 degrees out, and I was late for a meeting downtown. And I called an Uber. My Uber was late also.

So I decided, to heck with it. I’m going to run/walk to my meeting. And I went 15 blocks, and by the time I got 15 blocks in my run/walk, my heart was pounding. I was dizzy, I was lightheaded. And I thought, oh, my god, this heat is brutal. This could kill me if I had to go much farther.

And that was the first time, despite the fact that I had been a journalist covering climate change for a very long time, that I really realized what a dangerous force heat can be and how it can kill you like a bug zapper in the wrong kinds of conditions.

And I think it reflects a deeper misunderstanding about the risks of heat, unlike, say, a hurricane or sea level rise or other climate impacts, which are very visual. A wildfire — you look out the window, your trees are burning, you know you’re in trouble.

You look out the window on a hot day in Houston or in Miami or in Phoenix, and you can’t tell, looking out the window, if it’s 75 degrees or 125 degrees. There’s no visual indication of that. So it plays tricks with our minds in the sense of we don’t recognize the threat until our heart is pounding through our chest, and we’re already in trouble.

So we basically have one mechanism to release heat from our body, and that is sweating. So what happens when our bodies start to overheat is, our hearts start pounding faster and faster, trying to push the blood out towards our skin, where it can be cooled by the evaporation of sweat.

So as the temperature rises, our hearts start pounding harder and harder. If the temperatures rise high enough, if your body temperature rises high enough, it can’t cool off with that sweat. Then, essentially, the cells in our body start unraveling. And that’s really what an extreme heat stroke is.

Last year, a team of researchers wrote a pretty influential paper looking at what would happen if they had the combining events of a heat wave and a blackout. They looked at Atlanta, they looked at Phoenix, and they looked at Detroit. They modeled a five-day blackout. And over that five-day period, they found that in Phoenix, there would be as many as 800,000 emergency room visits in the city.

And they estimated a death toll of above 13,000 people, which is far, far higher than what they found in either Atlanta or Detroit. And the explanation for that is twofold. One is that Phoenix temperatures are higher. So that means the risk is higher, just because of that, but also because of the high penetration of air........

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