Coming up next, names for cold snaps, tide surges, landslides and solar flares.
Followed by name diversity arguments for them all.
I'm not dismissing the severity of these events, but this just reeks of headline clickbait marketing material.
A lot of people are gonna look real stupid in 10-20yr when it becomes clear in hindsight that the solution to societal alarm fatigue was not to just increase the volume. (And I'm gonna head off the inevitable snarky comments by reminding everyone that alarm fatigue caused by alarms rightfully going off is still alarm fatigue.)
People have no problem remembering the Hurricane of '38. This naming stuff is all theater. Playing PR games so you can have .05% more "resonates with the public" or whatever dumb KPI you're chasing this quarter isn't gonna slow or mitigate global warming. But it will help you be seen "doing something" which appears to matter a lot to a lot of people.
Remember Hurricane Katrina? Names help.
Specifically now that we have a material climate change problem, it helps to give a name to the problem.
Snarkily, I vote for the first one to be 'Chevy Suburban'.
we remember it because of the destruction, not because of the name. you could’ve called it august 05 hurricane and it would be the same thing.
e.g. 9-11
9-11 works because the tragedy was 'massive' (the biggest attack since pearl harbour and most civilian deaths ever).
Any name applied to 9-11 would have 'stuck'.
Moreover, 9-11 caught on at least in part because 911 is 'emergency' number in North America.
Hurricane Katrina comes nowhere near that threshold. Now - it may have been giving a populist name, such as 'The Orleans Breach' or something instead of an official name.
But the names really do help us remember and contextualize.
I assume that heat waves are now named by the mass media to give undeserved importance to the topic of global warming.