Heat waves are anonymous disasters. They rarely capture the public imagination or historical memory, despite being just as deadly—if not more so. Hurricane Katrina, for instance, killed over 1,300 people and remains etched in American consciousness. But the 2023 Phoenix heat wave, which lasted over a month and claimed an estimated 400 lives in one county alone, is already fading from memory. This week's heat wave is sweeping across the U.S., exposing nearly three-quarters of the population to temperatures of 90°F or higher, and over 30 million people to triple digits. Yet it’s unlikely to be remembered. Instead, it will blend into the background of increasingly frequent and extreme summer weather—a symptom of the broader climate crisis.

Heat waves, unlike dramatic storms or floods, lack visual spectacle and immediate destruction. Their impacts are delayed and cumulative: illness, death, infrastructure strain. They don’t reshape landscapes overnight, and their damage is hard to see until patterns emerge across years—evident in tree rings, fossil records, or shifts in coastlines. Ancient civilizations may have collapsed after long periods of heat-induced famine, but even then, their records mention droughts, not “heat waves.”

Some experts have proposed naming heat waves—like hurricanes—in order to elevate public awareness and promote safety. A 2022 pilot project in Seville, Spain, named a 110-degree event “Zoe.” Surveys later showed that people who remembered the name reported taking more heat-safety precautions. Yet naming heat waves presents challenges: they occur far more often than tropical storms, vary widely in geographic scale, and don’t have a universal temperature threshold.

Even if naming caught on, the overwhelming number and variability of heat waves might still prevent them from gaining cultural traction. Our failure to remember specific heat waves may reflect their silent nature—but their legacy, growing with each scorching summer, will be hard to forget in the long run.