More Than a Name
“I didn’t know they named heatwaves. (Maybe this is the first?)” I pondered in my journal. “What’s in a name? Something primal, mythical. A sense that we’re heading somewhere unseen.”
It was a Friday afternoon in July 2023. A pleasant summer day in Cambridge, England, where I was then studying. But elsewhere in Europe, extreme temperatures were overtaking international headlines as they reached life-threatening highs. I was inspired to jot in my journal not by the heat but by what seemed a peculiar reaction to it. News agencies began reporting mythical monikers along with numbers. Not just 115°F, but “Charon”. Not simply 48.8°C, but “Cerberus.” These heat waves, it seemed, had names! And these names felt like more than a clickbait curiosity. They seemed a subtle signifier of a larger shift in how billions of people could see a world ever-more unmoored from the past.
Europe was not alone in navigating that brutal summer. Phoenix, AZ was beset by an astonishing month-long streak of daytime temperatures topping 110°F. In Xinjiang in northwest China, one weather station recorded a portentous (and record-breaking) peak of 126°F. Temperatures were so high for so long around the planet that Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service concluded summer 2023 was the warmest on record “by a large margin.” António Guterres used his pulpit as Secretary-General of the United Nations to offer his own stark summary of the sweltering season: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”
That choice of word—”era”—feels blindingly apt. An era is more than an event or fad. An era encompasses something deeper: the social, cultural, and spiritual water in which a society swims, the backdrop against which all other choices are made. If we take Mr. Guterres at his word—and I do—new forms of living and new experiments in co-existence will emerge in tandem with this uncharted era of global boiling.
Naming heat waves seemed one such experiment. Though I quickly learned the story was more complicated. The “they” I referred to in my journal entry was less clear than I imagined. The names “Cerberus” and “Charon,” which I saw in headlines and chyrons, were chosen not by a national agency but by an Italian weather website, iLMeteo, which has been christening high pressure systems with mythological names since 2017.
The heatwaves of 2023, then, were not the first to earn names from an official government body—though they were not far off. That honor belongs to Zoe, who, in 2022, thrust temperatures in Seville above 110°F. Zoe’s anthropomorphization was born of a partnership between the Spanish city and the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, a sort of climate adaptation think tank. The aim was practical: the city would categorize heatwaves as many governments already do with storms, with the most severe meriting a name. The hope was to raise awareness of danger.
Whatever their origin, these names have struck a chord. Last summer, articles about naming heatwaves sprung up in publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Wired. All focused on the same points: why name heatwaves and how useful is this convention in reducing their harms? These are important questions to ask. But the articles, I felt, skimmed over a deeper question which fuelled my own jolting reaction to these appellations: What does it mean to name the weather and what does it do to our relationship with it?
Naming is more than a practicality. It is a description of reality that empowers and charges that reality. It is a way to make reality sticky—to congeal disparate experiences into something singular that can be discussed, manipulated, and built upon. After Hurricane Katrina, for example, there was a sharp decline in the name’s usage. In 2015 journalist Kathryn Robinson combed through social security data and soberly observed “The name hasn't been used in Louisiana since 2006.” Of course, Katrina wrought far more serious consequences than a drop in a name. But this example illustrates one of the most powerful functions of names: to carry ideas and experiences forward. To name is to remember—to the point that with “Katrina,” the name became inseparable from the memory. Naming, then, is the first step in bringing the infinite complexity of the world into the domain of the social and cultural. After all, what is a culture if not a collection of choices about what and how to remember?
That July afternoon, I was spurred to explore more about the history of naming weather events and was surprised to learn that this fact of contemporary meteorology had its origins in fiction. During WWII, U.S. Air Force meteorologists tasked with forecasting tropical cyclones began naming the storms they were tracking after their wives. How childish this must have seemed to seasoned forecasters of earlier generations! But the naming nonetheless helped streamline communication and reduce confusion. It is easier to talk about meteorological phenomena with a name than an elaborate description of this or that pressure differential across this or that latitude. Plus, there’s less risk of mixing up reports about multiple storms when they’re all happening at the same time. The naming practice slowly spread, and by the early 1950s, the U.S. government formally adopted it.
Those wartime meteorologists, however, did not pull the idea of naming storms from thin air. Years before, in 1941, George Stewart, an English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, published an unconventional yet widely read novel called Storm, in which a junior meteorologist names the weather systems he tracks. (Ironically, “the J.M.”, as Stewart calls the newly minted Weather Bureau employee, never himself earns a name.) The J.M., however, is not the book’s focus. No one is. Storm does not follow any single character too closely. Instead, it chronicles various encounters with a fictional storm that slowly builds and dissipates over twelve days as it passes through many lives: the superintendent who struggles to keep a mountain pass clear; the businessman whose transcontinental call is cut off by a storm-tossed tree tumbling on a far-off telephone line; a preacher whose prayer for rain is drenched in dramatic irony; a boar, Blue Boy, meandering home in the mud. No one character dominates the narrative because conventional characters are not the book’s protagonists. The storm itself is Stewart’s ultimate concern. Early on, when the eponymous storm is still just an “incipient little whorl,” the J.M. christens it Maria.
Stewart is unabashed in his anthropomorphizing. “Like a person, a storm is a focus of activities,” he writes, “having a birth, youth, maturity, old age, and death.” This may sound like a sensibility closer to the mythical than the empirical. But Stewart knew that such division is itself myth. The world of story is so entwined with the world of science and experience so as to be inseparable. This is the belief that frames the novel in the form of an epigraph taken from Sir Napier Shaw’s 1926 Manual of Meteorology: “Every theory of the course of events in nature is necessarily based on some process of simplification of the phenomena and is to some extent therefore a fairy tale.”
Stewart’s story is not a climate story. At the time of its publication, researchers were still decades away from recording the rising levels of greenhouse gasses behind today’s planetary warming. The novel barely gives climate science a nod. One character in Storm even derides climatology as merely “endless statistics about dead weather.”
Yet this text inspired a ubiquitous way of engaging with hurricanes and storms—some of the earliest symbols of climate change—by naming them. Now, as climate change intensifies and extreme weather becomes all too commonplace, this urge to name is spreading. While there may be legitimate public health reasons to name extreme weather events, I wonder too if the impulse beckons us closer to Stewart’s underlying argument: our planet, at its most extreme and inhospitable, takes on a kind of life that should be just as respected, understood, and engaged with as any person.
Engagement is the most important verb to stress. A climate that humans are changing is no longer a climate to be passively accepted and enjoyed. It is no longer the dependable source of stability setting the scene for our struggles. It is now its own character in our struggles, a dynamic protagonist acting and reacting to our choices and deeds. Even the scale at which communities engage with the climate has shrunk to a more personable level: the trend of naming heat waves has played out in cities. There are pilots of the same Seville heatwave program in Miami, Milwaukee and Kansas City, Mo. in the United States, as well as in Athens, Greece. This is not the global bureaucracy of the World Meteorological Association which names hurricanes and storms. This is a new way for local governments to relate to weather. It is an experiment in living with our changing world. Yes, it is practical, but it is also undeniably poetic in the way that any great poem is: it is a novel combination of words and ideas that prompts pause to see the world anew.
What would a world with a vocabulary that is both more precise about and more empathetic toward climates look like? Would we befriend raindrops or fall into spats with tornados? Could we learn the same compassion for the life of a blizzard as we have for the growth and development of a child? We do not (yet) name floods, droughts, snowstorms, and fires. Yet these extreme events will almost certainly happen more often and with greater intensity over the foreseeable future. Names give us a means to navigate this increasingly intricate landscape. Names allow us to speak to one another about the weather as it happens and, most importantly, to recall and understand it with the intellectual and emotional rigor it deserves.
Perhaps there is a naivety to read so much into these names. Perhaps they will fade as nothing more than a peculiar idea—tried and tabled in the early 2020s. Perhaps there are more important technologies, policies, and plans to detail and debate. Perhaps. Yet I am pulled back relentlessly to the aptness of Sir Shaw’s words in Stewart’s epigraph. Our lives are so chaotic and unpredictable as to only be comprehensible with the scaffolding of fairy tale and myth—of story. And in any story, the words matter. The names matter. The choice to name matters. Because in naming, the world takes shape.
Matt Hoisch is an Emmy-nominated journalist who has reported for NPR and PBS stations across the U.S. He holds degrees from Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, where he studied as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, conducting research on climate change and journalism. He currently lives in London.
Art by Ralph White.