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‘Heat Advisory’ joins the ranks of books intended to mobilize the public on climate change by amassing scientific facts in a readable manner. Other examples in this space include George Monbiot’s (2006) Heat: how we can stop the planet burning, and Elizabeth Kolbert’s (2014) The Sixth Extinction. This book’s angle is ‘health,’ broadly conceived, and its author, Alan Lockwood, is a neurologist, rather than an environmental journalist. This piqued my interest; perhaps the author would elucidate the relationship between heat and health at a neurological level, or launch a radical new take on climate change and health via a neurology’s disruption of the physiological and psychiatric divide, providing an aperture for analyses that collapse man/nature, matter/thought and nature/politics? However, driving this book is Lockwood’s role in Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSA). His primary objective is to make the case that climate change is bad for health. In so doing, the book provides a useful survey of mainstream accounts of climate change and its impacts, particularly on health. Like Monbiot (2006) and Kolbert (2014), the objective is assembling conventional, institutionalised, accessible forms of evidence to justify ‘doing something’ about climate change. The book’s scope demonstrates a Herculean eff ort, but this leaves its content rather general and thus its political utility somewhat limited – it is hard to see anyone using this book to make policy, although it has potential in lobbying for policy change, which Lockwood himself and presumably the PSA and others, will make use of. In the wake of Trump’s election and the emerging ultra-conservative political order in the United States, the remarkable re-inhabiting of the political by existing institutions and their agents perhaps means that this book’s decidedly non-radical approach will do surprisingly political work. While acknowledging the context and purposes of ‘Heat Advisory,’ its content – the articulation of climate change, heat and health – is the focus of this review. For mainstream academic disciplines this represents a complex conjunction of diff erent knowledges. From a Science and Technology Studies or Critical Geography perspective (among others), ‘climate change’, ‘heat’ and ‘health’ are profoundly contested, multiple and contingent, and their relations even more so. In the remainder of this review, we’ll take a look at Lockwood’s account and the more critical engagement that it inadvertently encourages.

Lockwood Alan H (2016) Heat Advisory: Protecting Health on a Warming Planet. MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts. 244 pages. ISBN: 978-0-262-53448-2