Review of Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World

Book Link: https://smile.amazon.com/Slow-Burn-Hidden-Costs-Warming-ebook/dp/B0CNL8F22B

I listened to this as an audiobook on Spotify and while it was very effective at delivering the narratives, I feel like this would be better as a physical read to see the numbers and graphs clearly next to the anecdotes and descriptions. Apart from that, I was very happy with the subject matter that bypassed much of the common climate change narratives and focused instead on the pieces of our lives that will change in subtle ways and over time that we may not otherwise notice. Think of it more like the "Boiling Frog" analogy where the change is only a little faster than your adaptation ability so you don't realize the criticality until its ultiamtely too late to change. The book does a great job layering in studies, data analysis, current measurements and metrics with compelling examples and anecdotes. There is a big emphasis overall on increased heat and how it negatively impacts student test scores, job performance, crime rates, judicial sentancing harshness, overall mortality and even the double-fault rate of profressional tennis players. It also addresses the connectivity of these scenarios and how low test scores can lead to lower paying jobs that are more impacted by heat increase or how heat drives higher crime rates and harsher judicial sentancing. Each of these heat-based scenarios is limiting on its own, but as they stack up onto each other and income inequality increases and newly unlivable places on the earth cause billions of people to migrate or die, you can quickly see the catastrophic network effects of this plays out. While the book isn't filled with much optimism, it does signal that there is hope and by focusing on some of these more localized and tangible impacts, it can present the problem of climate change in a more approachable manner with a lower barrier of entry and incentivize more people to take action.

Since this was an audiobook, I didn't get a chance to highlight sections like I usually do and instead included some highlights in the above section.