Treating heat waves more like hurricanes could help us take them more seriously.
We talk about heat waves in a weird way.
Natural disasters like hurricanes and wildfires are (rightly) accompanied by warnings of their danger. They bring a visible, elemental fury that’s hard to ignore. Heat, on the other hand, is invisible and insidious. We feel it on our skin, radiating from the sun or bouncing off asphalt and concrete, but we don’t see it the way we see, say, floodwaters carrying cars down the street. That makes heat waves easy to dismiss as quirky summer weather.
“Heat is an interesting hazard because it can kind of creep up on you,” said Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. “It tends to affect millions of people at a time, and a lot of people don’t realize the danger.”
But heat is the deadliest weather phenomenon in a typical year in the United States, killing an average of 158 people annually in the 30 years from 1992 to 2021, and climate change is only going to make heat waves more common. We already categorize tornadoes, and we name wildfires. Hurricanes get both. Would extending those ideas to heat waves help?
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“Naming hurricanes has been really effective,” said Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock), which studies climate resiliency. Hurricane-prone communities tend to have what McLeod called “a culture of preparedness and prevention,” where residents know how to prepare for storms of varying intensity. Residents who decide to ride out a weaker storm at home, for example, might board up their windows and store a few days’ worth of water. “Heat waves need that branding, that identity,” McLeod said.
To figure out how that branding might work, scientists at Arsht-Rock are running pilot projects in six cities — Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee, and Kansas City in the United States, along with Seville, Spain, and Athens, Greece — to test-drive a heat wave categorization system they developed. In July, Seville became the first city in the world to give a heat wave a name: Zoe. Spanish authorities ranked the heat wave at Category 3, indicating the highest level of risk.
Categorizing heat waves isn’t easy. “The same heat wave can create very different impacts depending upon when and where it occurs,” said Larry Kalkstein, Arsht-Rock’s chief heat science adviser and president of Applied Climatologists, Inc, a climatology lab that studies the effects of extreme weather on human health. “You can have two cities with almost identical weather, and you’ll still need two different categories.”
New York City and Philadelphia, for example, are close enough to each other that they tend to experience similar weather conditions on most days, but local conditions make a difference to how the residents of each city experience heat. That means heat waves can’t simply be categorized by temperature.
The National Weather Service uses a metric called the Heat Index that combines relative humidity with air temperature to give an idea of how heat actually feels, and an accompanying chart provides an idea of what effect that heat will have on the body. But while the heat index provides a better understanding of how heat might feel, it’s essentially an enhancement of the temperatures we already know. That means it runs the risk of being just as easy to ignore or underestimate.
Kalkstein and his colleagues instead developed a system that looks at historical weather and mortality data from past heat waves to determine what combination of weather conditions — heat, humidity, overnight temperatures, cloud cover, and more — leads to the most excess deaths in a particular region. From there, they developed an algorithm that compares the conditions of an incoming heat wave against that data, determines its likelihood of causing excess deaths, and then issues a category based on expected mortality. The categories come with recommendations for steps cities and their citizens should take to safeguard from the heat.
This is a notably different approach from most weather warning systems. Meteorological agencies usually issue warnings based on weather conditions alone. Hurricanes, for example, are solely classified according to wind speed.
“We’re suggesting an approach that is linking health and weather together,” said McLeod. “So there’s going to be obvious discomfort for meteorological agencies because they’re not health agencies. That’s a big change.”
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Courtesy Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center
The idea is already getting some pushback. In July, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a UN agency that coordinates weather data and planning across the world, released a statement saying it had no plans to name heat waves.
“What has been established for tropical cyclone events may not necessarily translate easily across to heatwaves,” the agency said. “Caution should be exercised when comparing or applying lessons or protocols from one hazard type to another, due to the important differences in the physical nature and impacts of storms and heatwaves.”
A 2017 study showed that naming winter storms — as the Weather Channel started doing in the US in the 2010s despite pushback from the National Weather Service — didn’t necessarily raise awareness of the storms, though that study’s sample size was limited to a few hundred college students. But pushing ahead with names and categories risks undermining the WMO and country-level agencies like the National Weather Service, according to Kristie Ebi, founding director of the University of Washington’s Center for Health and the Global Environment.
The system for naming and categorizing hurricanes is overseen by the WMO, which allows for cross-border coordination. Ebi said a system like Arsht-Rock’s, which is collaborating with some national meteorological offices but not with the WMO, raises questions of who people should listen to in case of extreme weather. “Are we not supposed to listen to the National Weather Service in cities that are doing something different?” Ebi asked.
There’s also a risk that giving heat waves names could prove counterproductive in the face of every other climate disaster we’re bound to experience. We already name fires and hurricanes, Marlon pointed out, and giving names to every natural disaster could create a confusing jumble of names that risk being blown out of proportion by an attention-hungry media.
For the climatologists at Arsht-Rock, the best-case scenario is to avoid that problem by simply having organizations like the WMO adopt their system. The idea is that their pilot program would collect evidence about whether the names and categories do or do not work. More than anything else, said McLeod, they see the categories as a system of communication that will help people understand when they’re in danger and what kind of precautions they need to take.
“Institutions change slowly,” said McLeod. “We think that the conditions and the death tolls push us to accelerate what we’re doing to save lives as soon as we can.”
If their pilot shows naming heat waves isn’t very effective, the climatologists will drop that part of their plans. But if naming does prove to be effective and organizations like the WMO still decide not to adopt them, McLeod said, they’ll continue working with whatever governments do want to use the system — exactly what Ebi and the WMO are afraid of.
Whatever happens, it’s clear we need to change how we talk about heat waves. ”I think there’s lots of creative ways to start raising awareness,” Ebi said. “We have to try to get people to really understand those risks. Nobody needs to die in a heat wave.”
Let envy be a motivator instead of holding you back.
There are many human emotions we’re told are unsavory. Seven of them have even been lumped together and deemed deadly: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.
Not only does society cast these sentiments in a negative light, but they aren’t super fun to experience, either. Envy, in particular, is one feeling we don’t enjoy sitting with for long. It’s uncomfortable to feel covetous or less-than when someone in our circle has something we want, like a supportive group of friends or a rewarding career. When everyone we know — and many people we don’t — constantly broadcast their wins and extravagances online, envy can rear its head more frequently than we’d like.
Envy shouldn’t be confused with jealousy. “Envy is about things that are important for us,” says Yochi Cohen-Charash, a psychology professor at Baruch College, “and the target of envy will always be somebody who is comparable to us.”
The people we are truly envious of will often be of a similar age and the same gender as us, and never people far out of our social stratum, like a celebrity or socialite. The specific things we covet closely relate to our self-identity, which is why others’ successes and relationships can make us feel so lousy; we want them, too. Higher social standing — respect and admiration from others — as opposed to material items is among the most common objects of envy, a group of international researchers found in 2020. Jealousy, on the other hand, refers to the anxiety of losing your accomplishments, status, or partner to another person. Jealousy factors in the feelings of external parties; envy is internal.
Envy takes two forms, says Gerrod Parrott, a psychology professor at Georgetown University: malicious envy, and non-malicious or benign envy. Malicious envy involves hostility or resentment toward another person who has it better than us. “The motivation is to try to take away what they have or to undermine their success or happiness,” Parrott says.
Non-malicious envy focuses more on the objects of our desire — a large family, the financial ability to buy a home — and digging into how the other person achieved those goals. “The malicious, sinful kind is really directed at pulling the other person down to your level,” Parrott says. “Whereas [with] the more benign form, the motivation is more trying to improve yourself and do better to attain what the other person has already attained.”
Where jealousy can mean going on the offensive in the name of self-preservation, envy allows for introspection, an internal process that can help us zero in on goals and provide a road map for achieving them.
Admitting envy
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of using envy as a force for good is admitting we’re envious in the first place, Cohen-Charash says. For example, initially we might find it unfair when a sibling has attention bestowed on them for getting engaged when our accomplishments are seemingly overlooked. The root of this thought is, in fact, envy. Rather than admit we didn’t measure up in some way, it’s easier on our ego to paint the situation as an injustice. (The envy-inducing situation can definitely be unfair, too, Cohen-Charash notes.) Without acknowledging our envy, however, we’re unable to deal with it in productive ways and instead may stew in feelings of resentment or inferiority. “Admitting it to yourself, actually, grounds you in a more realistic perspective,” Parrott says. “Then, maybe move on to thinking of ways in which you can do better.”
Sometimes just recognizing envy can alert us to goals or milestones we never thought we wanted, Parrott says. The pang of envy felt when third-wheeling with a friend and their partner can be an indicator of our own desire for a romantic relationship; the sense of inferiority experienced after eating a delicious home-cooked meal prepared by our amateur chef cousin may be a sign we’d like to improve our own skills in the kitchen.
Owning up to envy needn’t be a shameful or even public endeavor. While expressing feelings of envy to a friend or therapist can be cathartic, people very rarely open up to the subject of their envy, Cohen-Charash says. In fact, this may not always be helpful. “I would ask, what do you expect or want to happen if you do?” says marriage and family therapist Emily Simonian. “Do I think that they’re going to say something that’s going to make me feel better? Am I looking for consolation? Or do I want their advice?”
More often than not, Simonian says to err on the side of privacy when faced with admitting envy to the source. Confiding in an outside person can provide an objective perspective and validation, helping anchor you to reality, Parrott says, either justifying the envy and helping us move forward constructively or taking the personal sting out of the emotion.
Let envy serve as a motivator
Instead of letting malicious envy fuel us and engaging in a bit of schadenfreude when those we’re envious of stumble, use covetousness as a goal-setting tool. To determine if our envy motivates us to act maliciously or benignly, Simonian says to try filling in the blank: “I’m envious and it makes me want to …” Cry? Tarnish someone’s reputation? Better yourself?
Unpleasant emotions, like anxiety and, yes, envy, are functional, Cohen-Charash says, alerting us to situations that need to change. Envy, for instance, warns us of “a situation in which we are [performing at] a lower level in things that are important for us,” Cohen-Charash says. It can also motivate people to better themselves and achieve success, studies show. If we’re envious of a coworker’s swift rise within the company ranks, this can be fuel to pursue our own professional success.
Look to those we’re envious of, Parrott says, as a road map or role model for how to achieve goals. “How did they get that? What are they doing that I’m not?” he says. “Then you can imitate or emulate that other person’s methods, techniques, ideas, moves, and what have you to, in fact, be better yourself in some way.” It can be helpful to write out a list of steps or benchmarks to make a lofty goal less intimidating, Simonian says.
However, no amount of hard work or manifestation can bless us with generational wealth, inherent talents, or a colossal salary overnight. The envy we possess over a rich friend’s nice new car provides few signposts for how to attain one ourselves if we struggle to make ends meet. To soften the blow, Cohen-Charash says it’s helpful to compare ourselves with the subject of our envy in areas where we excel over the other person. The person with the nice car might be terrible at driving and constantly get parking tickets.
“If you can remember that everybody has their story and everybody has their problems and challenges,” Cohen-Charash says, “and we can find a situation in which we are doing better than them, that can already help us feel less frustrated, less envious, because we immediately see that it’s not the whole picture.”
Reframing envy
In the event that envy has turned malicious, there are ways to lessen the sting. Simonian says to consider that two seemingly opposing facts can both be true. We can be cognizant of our longing for a new job while also accepting the role we currently have.
Resentment occurs when envy persists without any action, Simonian says, so we need to dig deeper to root out causes of constant envy. She advises considering the question: “Are there things that I haven’t processed that are holding me back, or keeping me from being able to let these normal envious feelings kind of roll off my back?” We could be stewing in ongoing feelings of inadequacy based on past experiences. “Maybe I previously was fired from a job and that’s a sore spot for me,” she says. “So the promotion that I feel envious about really is hitting a pain point.”
Learning to simply appreciate the achievements of others can be reward enough, Parrott says — even if the others in question aren’t exactly your peers. “I’m never going to be an Olympic gymnast, and I can watch the Olympic gymnastics people and say, ‘Wow, that’s terrific and I’m glad it’s there in the world,’” Parrott says. “And I don’t feel like I immediately need to go start practicing on the pommel horse.”
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AI poses present risks and future ones. Why don’t the teams that work on them get along?
There are teams of researchers in academia and at major AI labs these days working on the problem of AI ethics, or the moral concerns raised by AI systems. These efforts tend to be especially focused on data privacy concerns and on what is known as AI bias — AI systems that, using training data with bias often built in, produce racist or sexist results, such as refusing women credit card limits they’d grant a man with identical qualifications.
There are also teams of researchers in academia and at some (though fewer) AI labs that are working on the problem of AI alignment. This is the risk that, as our AI systems become more powerful, our oversight methods and training approaches will be more and more meaningless for the task of getting them to do what we actually want. Ultimately, we’ll have handed humanity’s future over to systems with goals and priorities we don’t understand and can no longer influence.
Today, that often means that AI ethicists and those in AI alignment are working on similar problems. Improving the understanding of the internal workings of today’s AI systems is one approach to solving AI alignment, and is crucial for understanding when and where models are being misleading or discriminatory.
And in some ways, AI alignment is just the problem of AI bias writ (terrifyingly) large: We are assigning more societal decision-making power to systems that we don’t fully understand and can’t always audit, and that lawmakers don’t know nearly well enough to effectively regulate.
As impressive as modern artificial intelligence can seem, right now those AI systems are, in a sense, “stupid.” They tend to have very narrow scope and limited computing power. To the extent they can cause harm, they mostly do so either by replicating the harms in the data sets used to train them or through deliberate misuse by bad actors.
But AI won’t stay stupid forever, because lots of people are working diligently to make it as smart as possible.
Part of what makes current AI systems limited in the dangers they pose is that they don’t have a good model of the world. Yet teams are working to train models that do have a good understanding of the world. The other reason current systems are limited is that they aren’t integrated with the levers of power in our world — but other teams are trying very hard to build AI-powered drones, bombs, factories, and precision manufacturing tools.
That dynamic — where we’re pushing ahead to make AI systems smarter and smarter, without really understanding their goals or having a good way to audit or monitor them — sets us up for disaster.
And not in the distant future, but as soon as a few decades from now. That’s why it’s crucial to have AI ethics research focused on managing the implications of modern AI, and AI alignment research focused on preparing for powerful future systems.
Not just two sides of the same coin
So do these two groups of experts charged with making AI safe actually get along?
Hahaha, no.
These are two camps, and they’re two camps that sometimes stridently dislike each other.
From the perspective of people working on AI ethics, experts focusing on alignment are ignoring real problems we already experience today in favor of obsessing over future problems that might never come to be. Often, the alignment camp doesn’t even know what problems the ethics people are working on.
“Some people who work on longterm/AGI-style policy tend to ignore, minimize, or just not consider the immediate problems of AI deployment/harms,” Jack Clark, co-founder of the AI safety research lab Anthropic and former policy director at OpenAI, wrote this weekend.
From the perspective of many AI alignment people, however, lots of “ethics” work at top AI labs is basically just glorified public relations, chiefly designed so tech companies can say they’re concerned about ethics and avoid embarrassing PR snafus — but doing nothing to change the big-picture trajectory of AI development. In surveys of AI ethics experts, most say they don’t expect development practices at top companies to change to prioritize moral and societal concerns.
(To be clear, many AI alignment people also direct this complaint at others in the alignment camp. Lots of people are working on making AI systems more powerful and more dangerous, with various justifications for how this helps learn how to make them safer. From a more pessimistic perspective, nearly all AI ethics, AI safety, and AI alignment work is really just work on building more powerful AIs — but with better PR.)
Many AI ethics researchers, for their part, say they’d love to do more but are stymied by corporate cultures that don’t take them very seriously and don’t treat their work as a key technical priority, as former Google AI ethics researcher Meredith Whittaker noted in a tweet:
I have an AI ethics joke but it has to be approved by PR, legal, and our partners in the Department of Defense before I can tell it.
— Meredith Whittaker (@mer__edith) July 26, 2020