Heat waves will most likely become increasingly frequent, particularly in urban centers, where the risk tends to be higher. A major United Nations climate report released in August warned that nations have delayed curbing their fossil-fuel emissions for so long that they can no longer stop global warming from intensifying over the next 30 years, leading to more frequent life-threatening heat waves and severe droughts.
Often heat waves pose the most danger to people in places known for cooler weather, where some homes, community centers and libraries do not have air-conditioning. Aside from Greece, there have been deadly heat waves in recent months in places including the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, where record-breaking temperatures helped spread a wildfire that destroyed most of a small town in Western Canada.
Storms — like Tropical Storm Henri, which this week brought power outages and record rain to the Northeast — have been given names for at least a few hundred years, with 16th-century cyclones in the Caribbean named after saints, such as Tropical Storm San Roque in 1508 and Hurricane San Francisco in 1526, according to a research paper published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The U.S. National Hurricane Center officially started naming tropical storms in 1953 using only female names, and in 1978, it began including both men’s and women’s names on the Eastern North Pacific storm lists.
The use of short, easily remembered names instead of latitude-longitude identification methods can reduce confusion when there are several tropical storms happening at the same time, the National Hurricane Center said. For example, if one tropical storm is in the Gulf of Mexico, while another is in the Northeast, like Grace and Henri this week, using distinct names can reduce instances of people disregarding a warning, thinking it’s in reference to a faraway storm.
Britain, too, names storms. Its national meteorological service, the Met Office, began the practice six years ago, saying that assigning names makes it easier to communicate urgent notices about inclement weather.
Experts say the same logic apply to heat waves, even if they may not be as straightforward to categorize, since a heat wave in one place may not constitute a heat wave in another. Athens’s newly appointed chief heat officer, Eleni Myrivili, has said that scientists and officials were discussing ways to make it easier for policymakers to put preventive emergencies measures in places, including naming heat waves.
One drawback could be that if too many weather events have names, the message could get lost, said Suzana J. Camargo, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “I think it’s a nice tool to have and if it’s a big event, it makes sense, but I’m just worried if they start giving names to every little thing because it loses that power it has,” she said.
