Experts Are Fighting Over Whether to Treat Heat Waves Like Hurricanes
There’s a growing push to improve public risk awareness by giving heat waves names, just like hurricanes. Meteorologists are skeptical.
Commuters depart from London’s Waterloo railway station during a heat wave in August 2022.
Photographer: Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg
When a 40C (104F) heat wave threatened the UK for the first time in 2022, officials were caught flat-footed. This was uncharted territory for Britons, whose typical summer is dreary gray interspersed with flashes of welcome sunshine. Top temperatures in July in the UK barely graze 20C on average, even in our modern, warmed-up climate. Now 40C heat was set to affect the whole of Europe, cutting a swath through the UK that would put millions of people in danger.
“What happened back then had never happened before,” says Candice Howarth, head of climate adaptation and resilience at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. “The UK doesn’t have much experience of these types of risks. So the severity of the issue is quite difficult to convey.”