“Naming hurricanes but not heat waves leaves no doubt about which threat our government, culture and society take more seriously.”
– Sociologist and
Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (2002) author Eric Klinenberg, warning that “heat is a silent and invisible killer.” Far deadlier than other weather extremes, “it usually fails to generate the kind of spectacular imagery that lands wether on prime-time television or a newspaper’s front page.” Between 1999 and 2023, heat deaths in the United States more than doubled, Klinenberg explains. The 2023
Phoenix heatwave, for example, claimed over 600 lives.
