Imagine a well-known storm, such as Hurricane Katrina, building strength over the warming Atlantic Ocean and veering toward the Mississippi River mouth to inundate the magnificent city of New Orleans. Katrina killed over 1,300 people, as you may recall. You might recall other, less catastrophic storms, like Sandy, which killed at least 147 people overall and dozens in New York City. Now consider a well-known heat wave. It’s more challenging. However, heat waves can also be lethal. Phoenix, Arizona, experienced more than a month of intense heat in 2023, with temperatures reaching 119 degrees and an estimated 400 fatalities in the county. After two years, it’s largely forgotten. History is a big storm. The weather is a severe heat wave.
A large portion of the nation is in danger due to this week’s heat wave: According to one estimate, 245 million Americans, or nearly three-quarters of the country’s population, have experienced temperatures of 90 degrees or higher, and over 30 million are currently experiencing triple digits. However, unless we ourselves end up in the hospital or lose someone to heat stroke, very few of us will remember this common suffering. Rather, these few days will blend in with all the other periods of “record-setting temperatures” and “unseasonably warm weather” that currently characterize American summers. They will be just another indistinguishable and forgotten moment from our long-term decline into global disaster.
Heat waves have always been unidentified catastrophes. They don’t appear frequently in myths and ancient histories, and they don’t have the dramatic effects of earthquakes, volcanoes, or plagues. Neither the mythic force of the storms that threatened Odysseus nor the narrative resonance of the Vesuvius eruption have been attributed to any one heat wave in human history. When heat waves do occur in stories, they usually do so after a string of them that have exacerbated famines and droughts over months or years. The ruins of civilizations that disappeared after too many years without rain and poor harvests make up our primary cultural record of these accumulated episodes of intense heat.
What if, like Katrina and Sandy, heat waves were given names? They might have more traction in our cultural memory as a result. In recent years, a number of organizations have argued that heat waves should be classified similarly to tropical storms. (This week’s could be dubbed “Heat Wave Aaron” if it were the first in a new system.) This is supposed to increase awareness of heat and encourage people to stay indoors, making it a more significant topic in public discourse. This concept was tested in 2022 by a group collaborating with the Seville, Spain, mayor’s office. Zoe was the name given to a local heat wave that had reached 110 degrees. Six percent of residents who were asked to recall the name without being reminded also reported having increased their heat-safety practices, the team reported in a paper they published last year.
After the novelty of naming wore off for the Sevillians, no one can say if that effect would have persisted through other heat waves. Either way, the idea may be tricky to implement. On average, less than 20 tropical storms are named annually in the Atlantic Ocean. However, hundreds of heat waves occur each year in the United States alone, and their magnitudes vary greatly. Some spread like a thick, invisible down blanket across the nation, while others, like this week’s, are city-sized. Furthermore, heat waves begin at different temperatures in different locations, in contrast to tropical storms, which are classified based on wind speed. (Santa Fe’s typical summer day could be Seattle’s heat wave.) Which of these, then, merits a name tag and which does not? These details will need to be worked out, even if the naming concept is successful.
Unfortunately, most of us won’t be able to identify heat waves for a long time, if not forever. Maybe, though, we shouldn’t feel so embarrassed about this. The natural world, which hardly ever exhibits any enduring signs of a hot weather episode, shares our incapacity to document these hot spells in a more noticeable manner. In a single violent moment, a storm or an earthquake can completely change a landscape, leaving behind visible scars that persist for millennia. Heat waves typically appear in nature and culture after they have accumulated into a broader warming trend. As you wait for this week’s heat to subside, remember that only then will they be discernible in tree rings and ice cores, in inland-moving coastlines, and in the mass extinctions that stare out from the fossil record.
