Back in 2012, I wrote about the National Weather Service finally getting around to naming winter storms the way they name hurricanes, an idea that I had had myself. Here’s what I had to say about it at the time:
“From the ‘hey they stole my idea department’ comes an announcement that Winter Storms will now be getting names ala Hurricanes with the first storm set to be called Athena. It has a nice ring to it and it certainly sounds a whole lot better than last year’s, ‘that stupid storm that forced me to talk to my wife when the power got knocked out’.”
Now there’s a push to start naming heat waves as well.
As Wired puts it:
“Last summer, a monstrous heat wave descended on the United States. It claimed four lives in Maryland, one in Arizona, and one in Arkansas. Temperatures skyrocketed, with heat indexes—the measure of how hot it feels outside—reaching between 100 and 122 degrees Fahrenheit in some parts of the country. Power outages wreaked havoc on the residents of New York City and Washington, DC, who were left sweating in their homes.
That heat wave caused fatalities on par with many of the named hurricanes that circulate in the Gulf of Mexico. But unlike hurricanes—the worst of which carry memorable household names like Harvey, Sandy, or Maria—the July 2019 heat wave went nameless.
Now, as triple-digit heat waves set records around the country and around the world, a group of health experts, climate scientists, and policymakers are trying to give them names and rankings, just like hurricanes. In doing so, they hope to remind the public that extreme temperatures aren’t just an excuse to go to the beach—they can also be fatal.”
How fatal?! Well, “The World Health Organization estimates that from 1998 through 2017, more than 166,000 people died due to exposure to extreme heat. One catastrophic heat wave in 2003 killed tens of thousands in Italy and Spain. In the US, over 600 people succumb to extreme heat every year, outstripping the deaths from hurricanes, floods, or tornadoes in most years. And with climate change, sweltering temperatures are becoming all the more common.”
Sweltering is putting it mildly. Last week, the appropriately named Death Valley, California recorded the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded in the entire history of this planet. This week, the rest of California is burning with some 400 different forest fires ongoing thanks to a series of lightning strikes combined with drought conditions and arid landscapes. A frightening situation that is likely to get worse before it gets better.
Suffice it to say we are in the midst of a climate emergency and temperatures are just going to continue to rise. If naming storms can help people realize what they’re up against and ultimately save lives then it seems like an obvious move to make.
Let’s start naming heat waves.
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