“Supersized heatwaves used to be rare,” Tamman wrote. “No longer. Now they swarm the planet.” In a video accompanying the report, he explained that “whereas heat waves were once small and relatively self-contained, now we live in a world where these heat waves are massive.”
Heat storms, Tamman added in the video, are not only larger and stronger than heat waves, they “are also different in another way: They are cascading, where there is an endless series of storms, one after the other.” Indeed, for the last 18 years straight, “at least one heat storm has been roiling the planet, and often more than one,” according to a fresh analysis of global temperature data that Reuters conducted with the scientists.
Like the best climate reporting, the Reuters investigation both humanized and localized the story. One installment told the story of Justice Trumpler, a 17-year-old high school football captain in Texas who invites college recruiters to watch him play, only to succumb to nonstop vomiting in the 100-degree heat and end up in the hospital. Another installment described how hundreds of the iconic pink dolphins that inhabit the Amazon river were literally cooked to death by extreme heat. In the Philippines, a math teacher saw a student face down on his desk, crying; when the teacher coaxed him to sit up, the boy’s face and chest were covered in blood from a spontaneous nosebleed, a common malady in extreme heat.
To help both the public and policymakers grasp how harshly even today’s 1.4 C of global warming is transforming life on earth, the Reuters project suggested that heat storms be given names, just as hurricanes routinely are. According to the report, “Naming events is ‘a powerful way for people to understand that something is happening,’ Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, told Reuters. Yet ‘we don’t currently do that with heatwaves,’ he said, even though heat has been estimated to kill almost half a million people a year.”
For nearly a decade, thousands of climate scientists have been deliberately using the term “emergency” to describe how fast and dangerously global warming is intensifying. Activists picked up the “emergency” framing as well, but the Reuters findings underscore that that framing has always been fundamentally a matter of science, not politics.
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