There’s Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy. Why Not Heat Wave Harvey?

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.