Think of a famous storm—maybe Hurricane Katrina, gathering force over the warming Atlantic surface and pinwheeling toward the mouth of the Mississippi River to flood the great city of New Orleans. You may remember that Katrina killed more than 1,300 people. You may remember other, less deadly storms, such as Sandy, which killed dozens of people in New York City, and at least 147 overall. Now think of a famous heat wave. It’s more difficult to do. And yet, heat waves can be fatal too. In 2023, scorching weather lingered for more than a month in Phoenix, Arizona, pushing temperatures to 119 degrees and killing an estimated 400 people in the county. Two years later, it’s all but forgotten. A major storm is history. A major heat wave is the weather.
This week’s heat wave is menacing much of the entire country: Almost three-quarters of America’s population—245 million people—has been subjected to temperatures of at least 90 degrees, and more than 30 million people are experiencing triple digits, according to one estimate. Yet few of us will remember this shared misery, unless we ourselves happen to be hospitalized because of it, or lose someone to heat stroke. Instead, these few days will blur together with all the other stretches of “unseasonably warm weather” and “record-setting temperatures” that now define summer in America. They will constitute just one more undifferentiated and unremembered moment from our extended slide into planetary catastrophe.
Heat waves have always been anonymous disasters. They lack the flashy action of earthquakes, volcanoes, or plagues, and they don’t show up much in ancient histories and myths. No single heat wave from human history has been assigned the narrative resonance of the Vesuvius eruption, or the mythic power of the storms that imperiled Odysseus. When heat waves do appear in stories, they tend to come in aggregate, after a series of them, occurring over months or years, have intensified droughts and famines. Our main cultural record of these collected runs of extreme heat consists of ruins left behind by civilizations that vanished after too many rainless years and failed harvests.
What if heat waves could be called by name, like Katrina and Sandy? Maybe that would give them greater purchase on our cultural memory. Several organizations have recently argued that we ought to label heat waves as we do tropical storms. (This week’s, if it were the first in some new system, might be called “Heat Wave Aaron.”) Supposedly, this would make heat loom larger in public discourse: More people would become aware of it and stay indoors. In 2022, a team working with the Mayor’s office in Seville, Spain, piloted this idea. They assigned a local heat wave that had reached 110 degrees the name Zoe. According to a paper the team published last year, the 6 percent of surveyed residents who could recall the name without prompting also said they’d engaged in more heat-safety behaviors.
No one knows whether that effect would have lasted through other heat waves, once the novelty of naming wore off for the Sevillians. Either way, the idea may be tricky to implement. In the Atlantic Ocean, fewer than 20 tropical storms, on average, are named each year. But the U.S. alone is subject to hundreds of annual heat waves, and they vary immensely in scale. Some are city-size and others—like this week’s—drape themselves across the country like a thick and invisible down blanket. And unlike tropical storms, which are categorized according to wind speed, heat waves kick in at different temperatures in different places. (Seattle’s heat wave might be Santa Fe’s average summer day.) So which of these deserve a name tag, and which ones don’t? Even if the naming idea catches on, these details will need working out.
Alas, heat waves will likely remain anonymous for most of us for a good while longer, if not forever. But perhaps we should not be so ashamed of this. Our inability to record these sweltering spells in a more conspicuous way is shared by the natural world, which rarely shows the marks of an episode of hot weather in any lasting way. A storm or earthquake can reconfigure a landscape in a single moment of violence, leaving behind scars that can still be seen with the naked eye millennia later. In nature, as in culture, heat waves tend to show themselves after they have piled up into a larger warming trend. Only then are they visible in tree rings and ice cores, in coastlines that move inland, and in the mass extinctions that glare out from the fossil record—a thought to console yourself with as you wait for this week’s heat to break.
The post This Wretched Heat Deserves a Name appeared first on The Atlantic.
