Do you remember the heat dome that settled over Washington and Oregon in 2021, leading to thousands of hospitalizations and over 600 estimated fatalities? Or last summer’s heat wave in Phoenix, when the temperature hit or exceeded 110 degrees for 31 straight days, accounting for most of Maricopa County’s 645 heat-related deaths in 2023?
How closely are you tracking the potentially record-setting heat wave across the Western United States this week?
In typical years, more Americans die in heat waves than in hurricanes, tornadoes and floods combined. Historically, though, the public, the media and politicians are quick to forget heat disasters — even where they happen most. It’s as if we have a will not to know about the brutal ways that extreme heat affects us.
Denial only makes us more vulnerable to the searing summers ahead. Between 1999 and 2023, heat deaths in the United States more than doubled. As the planet warms and lethal heat events become more severe and more frequent, there’s an urgent need to make dangerous heat more recognizable.
Fortunately, there is a low-cost and promising solution: naming major heat waves, giving each potentially catastrophic event its own identity and publicly acknowledging how extreme heat is changing our lives.
Naming dangerous weather systems is hardly a revolutionary idea. The United States already does it for tropical storms and hurricanes, and with great effect. Forecasters started that tradition in 1953, in the hope of improving public communications and reducing the risk of confusion when multiple storms emerged at once.
That may have been the original goal of naming hurricanes, but the effects have been more profound. The names have helped create a narrative around each major storm as well as a sense of import around hurricanes in general.
Generations of anthropologists have demonstrated how naming not just people but also pets, places and prized objects can imbue the world with meaning. When an object receives a human name, that act of anthropomorphism elevates its social importance. It invites us to develop more complex and intensely affective relationships with what might otherwise be vague and generic. Consider the difference between, say, “Gulf Coast Storm 2005” and “Hurricane Katrina,” or “North Atlantic Storm 2012” and “Superstorm Sandy.” One sounds like an item in a spreadsheet, the other like an epochal event.
Naming an extreme weather system also helps us recognize it as an enemy and mobilize support for public projects to combat future storms. After Sandy, for instance, citizens and officials concerned about climate change used stories from the storm to help persuade lawmakers to invest billions in new infrastructure, including renewable energy projects and flood management systems that double as social infrastructure. Heat waves rarely inspire that kind of policy action, because we can barely distinguish one from another, even when we’ve lived through them.
Naming hurricanes but not heat waves leaves no doubt about which threat our government, culture and society take more seriously. Compared with hurricanes, heat waves already face an uphill battle for attention, in part because the people they affect most are not property owners in expensive coastal areas, but America’s most disadvantaged: the old, the isolated, the poor and racially segregated residents of impoverished urban neighborhoods.
Heat is a silent and invisible killer. It usually fails to generate the kind of spectacular imagery that lands weather on prime-time television or a newspaper’s front page. We’ve all seen round-the-clock coverage of an approaching hurricane, animated by color-coded satellite maps, live reports from a gusty coast and stern warnings about imminent danger. Heat waves don’t receive anywhere near that level of attention. Instead of conveying drama and danger, most heat stories read like dry public service announcements.
What’s more, heat doesn’t produce enough property damage to induce federal emergency declarations from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose policies have historically leaned more toward protecting property and sustaining the economy than saving lives. Environmental, labor and health care groups have petitioned FEMA to start classifying extreme heat as a major disaster, but so far to no avail. As a result, state and local governments aren’t entitled to relief funds that could help them prepare for and cope with heat waves by, for example, shoring up their social infrastructure, so that residents can access libraries, swimming pools and senior centers during power outages, or improving the resilience of the electrical grid.
When a hurricane is coming, governors are expected to remain in their state to lead the response. But during the great Chicago heat wave of 1995, for instance, when an estimated 739 people died in just one blistering week, Chicago’s mayor and health commissioner went on vacation to escape the stifling conditions. The same thing happened across Europe in 2003, when officials from several nations were on vacation during a terribly lethal heat wave. Had those heat waves had a name, and been publicly recognized as a crisis, leaders might’ve been pressured to remain on hand to manage the response — and perhaps even save lives.
Today, as the world reckons with one record-breaking summer of heat after the next, it’s time for a new approach. Meteorologists are still debating whether naming heat waves is the right one. The World Meteorological Organization, which oversees the naming of hurricanes, opposes the idea out of concern that it could prove ineffective or even backfire by misdirecting attention from “the messages that matter most, which are: who is in danger and how to respond.” There is, as the public health scholar Kristie Ebi noted, “no evidence” that a name alone can “increase awareness or uptake of heat-preventive measures,” nor do we yet have clear standards for which heat systems merit special designation and which do not.
But now is the time for meteorological and government authorities to begin creating such standards. In recent years, cities in Greece and Spain have piloted programs for ranking heat waves and naming the most severe ones. One study found that people in Seville, Spain, who recalled the name of a 2022 heat wave were more likely to take heat-wave safety measures. While more research is certainly needed, those programs suggest that designing a naming system for heat waves is doable, and that the risks should not stand in the way of improving upon the already disastrous status quo. At minimum, we should encourage states and municipalities to experiment with naming dangerously hot weather systems, so we can measure how government agencies, journalists and ordinary people respond.
Climate change requires cultural change, not just technological fixes. Naming the single deadliest meteorological threat our species faces is one of the easiest changes we can make. Over time, it would not only elevate the cultural importance of major heat events. It would also signal that scientists and officials want all of us to rethink our relationship to the environment, and to one another.
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