The Climate Is Falling Apart. Prepare for the Push Alerts.
6 min read
Last July, I was living in Montreal when an emergency push alert from Canada’s environmental agency popped up on my phone, accompanied by a loud alarm. It had been raining ferociously that afternoon, and the wind was picking up. The alert warned of something worse—a marine tornado, which “are often wrapped in rain and may not be visible”—and ordered, “Take cover immediately if threatening weather approaches.”
I looked outside. The wind was howling louder now, and the sky was a strange gray. Radio signal was dipping in and out. I knocked on the ground-floor neighbor’s door to shelter there. This particular tornado spared Montreal, touching down about 30 miles northwest of the city. But the alert worked: We took measures to protect ourselves.
I took a screenshot of that push alert—a memento from this moment in which extreme weather is increasing. Climate change is here; these are the emergencies that come with it. Each push alert marks the distance we’re closing between the previous range of normal activity and the future that scientists warned us of.
I got another push alert this June, now living in a different city: “New York City USA Heat Wave: Please Take Precautions.” This one came from an air-quality-monitoring app I’d downloaded—not from any governmental agency. A colleague got a similar alert from the National Weather Service through his Alexa app warning about degraded air quality, the result of ground-level ozone, which commonly forms in overheated cities. We both took a screenshot of the message we received. They still feel novel, for now.
But as climate change progresses and extreme events mount, these alerts will keep coming. Eventually, certain climate-related extreme weather events may become so repetitive that their danger—though no less threatening—might cease to feel exceptional. Some call this human quirk “shifting baseline syndrome.” Emergency managers call it “alert fatigue.” It may be one of the biggest problems facing their field as climate disasters mount.
Some emergency push alerts come from private apps, but my phone, and probably yours too, is attached to the U.S. Wireless Emergency Alert system. FEMA administers the channel, but authorized federal, state, tribal, and local emergency managers can all use it to disseminate a message on virtually everyone’s phones in a specific area. (You probably received the blaring test of the system on October 4, 2023.) The system is remarkable, and can be lifesaving. But its usefulness is vulnerable to both bureaucratic misuse and the human capacity to normalize almost anything.
Jeannette Sutton, a social scientist who studies alerts and warnings at the University at Albany’s College of Emergency Preparedness, told me that alert fatigue is likely fueled by poor use of the system. It’s the Wild West, with badly worded or poorly targeted alerts being fired off too often. For example, Sutton thinks that the system shouldn’t be used for road closures—“unless it’s a bridge that’s collapsed”—nor for Amber Alerts and similar notifications, except in the exact geographic area where the missing person is likely to be found. But Texas, for example, does use the Wireless Emergency Alert system for road closures, Sutton said, and it pushes Amber Alerts out statewide, even though the majority of people who receive the message are in the wrong place to do anything about it. (Texas is a very big state.) Paralysis and disengagement follow. The warnings are loud and intrusive. Texans might opt out of the system altogether.
Sutton trains emergency responders on communication, and maintains a website where she line-edits real emergency alerts; even the most necessary ones are prone to bad form. For example, a recent fire warning in Maricopa County, Arizona, was so full of jargon that the average person might have no idea whether they need to evacuate, she said. A good alert should have at least three basic elements: the affected location, plain-language guidance on what actions people should take to protect themselves, and the time of the threats, or the time by which people should take action. Commonly, alerts are missing one or more of these things. I thought about the push alert I’d gotten in the New York heat wave: “Take precautions.” But what precautions?
By contrast, a well-worded emergency alert sent to Californians during a heat wave in 2022 was a major success: It urged people to conserve electricity, and they did, preventing heat-induced blackouts that could have been deadly for vulnerable people left without air-conditioning or elevator access.
Even with the best-made alerts, though, some climate emergencies—including heat waves—would still pose an intractable communication problem. People need to be warned about their risk, but if that risk endures for days or weeks, or repeats every month, fatigue will kick in. “Staying on heightened alert is not healthy for us,” Sutton said. “So how frequently do you tell people it’s hot and it’s going to be hot?” She and her colleagues are now surveying people on the West Coast to ask how many of them have opted out of the Wireless Emergency Alert system, and which message was their last straw. Understanding this is of particular importance for California and other western states, where evacuation orders during wildfires are sent via push alert through the system, and the U.S. Geological Survey’s earthquake early-warning system disseminates messages on the same channel.
Some agencies that use these systems are aware of the possibility of overdoing it. Since 2012, the National Weather Service has sent approximately 69,000 push alerts to people’s phones to warn them about hazardous weather in their area; the agency says that it hasn’t done the full statistical analysis to know whether the rate of alerts has gone up in recent years, but that it is honing its strategies to be sure the alerts go out only when the threat is high. “For example, we can now issue Severe Thunderstorm Warnings for only those which are particularly dangerous, like a derecho,” Chris Maier, the national warning coordination meteorologist for the service, wrote in an email.
Another problem for emergency alerts is the breakdown of X (formerly Twitter) as a real communication tool. It used to be a reliable way to track a fast-moving situation in real time, and acted as a direct-alert platform for agencies to push out information as situations changed. Agencies can’t constantly pump out successive alerts, but they can continuously tweet crucial information to followers. But X is now a mess of disinformation, and has at times limited automatic posting, which was how some official agency accounts disseminated warnings and advisories. The loss to emergency management is “massive,” Sutton said. Government agencies such as the National Weather Service “basically used Twitter as their critical infrastructure,” and have yet to find a replacement.
For now, climate push alerts are our new reality, and emergency managers will continue trying to figure out how to keep people engaged, pressing always against the slippage of attention that marks our strange human condition: When we’re in danger, we might not be moved to do anything about it. But even if, psychologically, our baselines shift, we’re still just bodies with deadly temperature limits and breakable bones. The heat waves and tornadoes will keep coming for us. So next time you get a push alert, take a screenshot and heed its warnings. Even if you feel a twinge of annoyance, don’t opt out. A future alert might just save your life.
