Oscar Wilde is attributed as saying that conversation about the weather was the last refuge of the unimaginative. Wilde was not confronted with the reality of climate change in the form of successive heatwaves when he made that comment.
Whenever there is a heatwave, the media cycles footage of reporters at public beaches, B-roll of people with ice-creams in hand, children splashing in water fountains and sunbathers in parks. There will always be sunbathers in parks. Typically, these images signal the onset of summer but the visual grammar of a UK heatwave codes heat as leisure and relies on the hackneyed tropes of beaches, women in bikinis (tabloids), dogs in paddling pools. It's usually paired with bold headlines like 'phew, what a scorcher' in the red tops.
Leisure imagery typically frames heat as an amenity to be enjoyed rather than a risk to be managed, which suppresses the sense of threat that mobilises adaptation. Research from Imperial College London, the Met Office and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine estimated that more than 2,700 people in England and Wales are thought to have died from heat-related causes during the May and June heatwaves. Around 550 deaths are estimated to have occurred in the May heatwave (21 – 29 May 2026) and 2,200 during the June heatwave (18 – 28 June 2026). 2,700 deaths is a substantial death toll, but the imagery reflects a category error by using the wrong signifiers.
Dr. Clair Barnes, Research Associate in Extreme Weather and Climate Change, Imperial College London is quoted in the accompanying release:
“Every time we have a heatwave, our news is filled with reporters at swimming pools, images of people eating ice cream and sunbathers on beaches. We all love the sun, but people need to be aware that we are now seeing dangerous climate-change fuelled heat that is claiming lives, disrupting schools and hospitals and shutting down transport and infrastructure"
Erroneous framing has downstream governance effects and a consequential impact on policy. Building public support and advocacy for investments in cooling centres and workplace heat limits, for example is challenging when the visual narrative is supported by families on crowded, sandy beaches enjoying ice-cream. Representation doesn't sit downstream of risk framing; it constitutes it – never more so than in the image saturated global culture of 2026. Setting a misaligned adaptation baseline lower than what science warrants creates friction for meaningful mitigation measures.
Heat mortality is invisible in a way that floods and wildfires aren't. Depicting the truth of it is challenging. Wildfire offers images of gallant firefighters, dramatic flames and smoke-filled skies together with burn scars and destroyed homes in the aftermath. But heat kills the most vulnerable indoors, days later, from cardiac and respiratory distress that are not immediately attributable. There is no photograph of the actual harm. The picture desk defaults to the image of the beach because the event generates it. The reason the deaths are hard to count - dispersed, indoors, attributed to other causes on death certificates - is the reason they're hard to depict. What we choose to measure and what we're able to photograph are governed by the same underlying visibility issue. Both bias the response toward the obvious and away from the diffuse lethal hazard.
There's also a distribution dimension that atypical iconography erases. Beach photos depict a population that experiences heat as pleasure - young, able and healthy, electing to be outside. The people dying skew to the near inverse - elderly, housebound, poor, often alone and in inadequately ventilated flats. People with disabilities or mobility issues fall into the same vulnerability group. The representative images don't just misjudge the valence of heat, they depict the least impacted demographic.
The Midlands-vs-south finding in the Imperial study is a version of this - risk concentrating where it isn't expected or pictured. The Met Office and several media outlets have consciously shifted toward extreme heat language and red-coded heat maps. The use of amber/red health-alert framing is also a deliberate step to re-code heat as a danger to life. This approach is not without penalty and can create 'alert fatigue' but it also separates hazard from risk. A single national figure or a temperature map focuses attention on areas of red (highest temperature). But the mortality burden was distributed more evenly than temperature which means the map misrepresents the map of harm. The researchers propose that accumulated resilience through exposure in the south and adaptation are likely factors - the south is more accustomed to dealing with extreme heat. What's easy to measure and depict (peak temperatures, south east concentration) diverges from what actually killed people (relative anomaly and broader mortality distribution).
There is no visual language for a hazard that is as multi-faceted as heat but marketing capitalises on heat as being a positive. Nobody sells the idea of a holiday around a wildfire. Tourism, retail and lifestyle industries are commercially incentivised to promote heat as pleasure which creates tension and noise.
Wilde may have thought that talk of the weather was the last bastion of the unimaginative, but our response to coping with it has to be imaginative.
