Think of a famous storm—maybe Hurricane Katrina, gathering force over the warming Atlantic surface and pinwheeling toward the mouth of the Mississippi River to flood the great city of New Orleans. You may remember that Katrina killed more than 1,300 people. You may remember other, less deadly storms, such as Sandy, which killed dozens of people in New York City, and at least 147 overall. Now think of a famous heat wave. It’s more difficult to do. And yet, heat waves can be fatal too. In 2023, scorching weather lingered for more than a month in Phoenix, Arizona, pushing temperatures to 119 degrees and killing an estimated 400 people in the county. Two years later, it’s all but forgotten. A major storm is history. A major heat wave is the weather.
想想一场著名的风暴 - 卡特里娜飓风，将力量聚集在温暖的大西洋地面上，并朝着密西西比河的嘴里旋转，淹没了新奥尔良的伟大城市。您可能还记得卡特里娜飓风杀死了1300多人。您可能还记得其他致命的风暴，例如桑迪（Sandy），桑迪（Sandy）在纽约市杀死了数十人，总体上至少有147人。现在想想著名的热浪。要做更困难。然而，热浪也可能致命。2023年，在亚利桑那州凤凰城持续了一个多月的天气，将温度提高到119度，并杀死了该县大约400人。两年后，几乎被遗忘了。主要风暴是历史。主要的热浪是天气。
This week’s heat wave is menacing much of the entire country: Almost three-quarters of America’s population—245 million people—have been subjected to temperatures of at least 90 degrees, and more than 30 million people are experiencing triple digits, according to one estimate. Yet few of us will remember this shared misery, unless we ourselves happen to be hospitalized because of it, or lose someone to heat stroke. Instead, these few days will blur together with all the other stretches of “unseasonably warm weather” and “record-setting temperatures” that now define summer in America. They will constitute just one more undifferentiated and unremembered moment from our extended slide into planetary catastrophe.
本周的热浪正在险恶，整个国家的大部分地区：美国人口中几乎四分之三（2004.5亿人）受到至少90度的温度，并且根据一项估计，超过3000万人的温度正在经历三位数。然而，我们当中很少有人会记得这种共同的痛苦，除非我们自己碰巧由于碰巧住院，或者失去了中风的人。取而代之的是，这几天将与其他所有“不合时宜的温暖天气”和“创纪录的温度”一起模糊，现在定义了美国的夏季。从我们扩展的滑梯到行星灾难中，它们将仅构成另外一个未分化和未记录的时刻。
Heat waves have always been anonymous disasters. They lack the flashy action of earthquakes, volcanoes, or plagues, and they don’t show up much in ancient histories and myths. No single heat wave from human history has been assigned the narrative resonance of the Vesuvius eruption, or the mythic power of the storms that imperiled Odysseus. When heat waves do appear in stories, they tend to come in aggregate, after a series of them, occurring over months or years, have intensified droughts and famines. Our main cultural record of these collected runs of extreme heat consists of ruins left behind by civilizations that vanished after too many rainless years and failed harvests.
热浪一直是匿名灾难。他们缺乏地震，火山或瘟疫的浮华动作，并且在古老的历史和神话中并没有太多出现。人类历史上没有任何一波热浪被分配给维苏威爆发的叙事共鸣，或者没有造成奥德修斯风暴的神话般的力量。当热浪确实出现在故事中时，它们往往会在一系列数月或数年的时间内汇集起来，加剧了干旱和饥荒。我们对这些收集到的极端热量的主要文化记录是由文明留下的废墟组成，这些文明在过多的少年几年后消失了，收成失败了。
What if heat waves could be called by name, like Katrina and Sandy? Maybe that would give them greater purchase on our cultural memory. Several organizations have recently argued that we ought to label heat waves as we do tropical storms. (This week’s, if it were the first in some new system, might be called “Heat Wave Aaron.”) Supposedly, this would make heat loom larger in public discourse: More people would become aware of it and stay indoors. In 2022, a team working with the mayor’s office in Seville, Spain, piloted this idea. They assigned a local heat wave that had reached 110 degrees the name Zoe. According to a paper the team published last year, the 6 percent of surveyed residents who could recall the name without prompting also said they’d engaged in more heat-safety behaviors.
如果可以像卡特里娜飓风和桑迪这样的名字称呼热浪怎么办？也许这会让他们在我们的文化记忆中获得更多的购买。一些组织最近辩称，我们应该在热带风暴时标记热浪。（本周，如果它是一些新系统中的第一个，则可能被称为“热浪Aaron”。）据说，这会使热织机在公共话语中更大：越来越多的人会意识到它并留在室内。2022年，与西班牙塞维利亚市市长办公室合作的团队提出了这个想法。他们分配了一个当地的热浪，该浪潮达到了110度，名称为Zoe。根据一篇论文，该团队去年发表了，有6％的受调查居民可以回想起这个名字而不提示的居民也表示他们从事了更多的热安全行为。
No one knows whether that effect would have lasted through other heat waves, once the novelty of naming wore off for the Sevillians. Either way, the idea may be tricky to implement. In the Atlantic Ocean, fewer than 20 tropical storms, on average, are named each year. But the United States alone is subject to hundreds of annual heat waves, and they vary immensely in scale. Some are city-size, and others—like this week’s—drape themselves across the country like a thick and invisible down blanket. And unlike tropical storms, which are categorized according to wind speed, heat waves kick in at different temperatures in different places. (Seattle’s heat wave might be Santa Fe’s average summer day.) So which of these deserve a name tag, and which ones don’t? Even if the naming idea catches on, these details will need working out.
没有人知道这种效果是否会持续到其他热浪中，一旦命名的新颖性就消失了塞维利亚人。无论哪种方式，实施的想法都可能很棘手。在大西洋，每年平均命名不到20个热带风暴。但是，仅美国就会受到数百次热浪的影响，并且它们的规模差异很大。有些是城市大小的，有些是本周的大小，就像本周的雨水一样，像一条厚而不可见的毯子一样。与热带风暴（根据风速对热带风暴）不同，在不同地方的不同温度下启动热浪。（西雅图的热浪可能是圣达菲的平均夏日。）那么，哪个值得拥有名字标签，哪些牌号没有？即使命名的想法抓住了，这些细节也需要解决。
Alas, heat waves will likely remain anonymous for most of us for a good while longer, if not forever. But perhaps we should not be so ashamed of this. Our inability to record these sweltering spells in a more conspicuous way is shared by the natural world, which rarely shows the marks of an episode of hot weather in any lasting way. A storm or an earthquake can reconfigure a landscape in a single moment of violence, leaving behind scars that can still be seen with the naked eye millennia later. In nature, as in culture, heat waves tend to show themselves after they have piled up into a larger warming trend. Only then are they visible in tree rings and ice cores, in coastlines that move inland, and in the mass extinctions that glare out from the fossil record—a thought to console yourself with as you wait for this week’s heat to break.
las，对于我们大多数人来说，热浪可能会保持匿名，甚至永远不会永远。但是也许我们不应该为此感到羞耻。我们无法以更明显的方式记录这些闷热的咒语是由自然世界共享的，这很少以任何持久的方式显示出炎热天气的情节的痕迹。暴风雨或地震可以在一次暴力时刻重新配置景观，留下疤痕，这些疤痕仍然可以与千年后的肉眼看到。在自然界中，就像在文化中一样，热浪倾向于堆积到更大的变暖趋势之后。只有这样，它们才在树环和冰芯中看到，在内陆移动的海岸线以及从化石记录中眩光的大规模灭绝中都可以看到它们 - 当您等待本周的热量破裂时，人们认为自己可以安慰自己。
