England is sweltering under an red heat health alert and could see its hottest June day on record. In North America, football fans and players are suffering, with a quarter of this summer’s World Cup matches forecast to be played in dangerous heat.

The public know to expect this in advance because the science of forecasting has become remarkably powerful. Scientists can run a million versions of the future before it arrives. But seeing the future in data is not the same as being ready for it. The gap between knowing and doing is not a gap in our technical capability. It is a gap in human imagination.

In September 2024, Storm Boris brought severe flooding across central Europe. Forecasts gave authorities time to act. Thousands of people were evacuated. The science helped people see into the future.

Three years earlier, in July 2021, forecasts for rivers in western Germany were predicting serious flooding several days ahead. Yet some people did not receive warnings. Others did not understand what the warnings meant. And some simply could not imagine that the flood would be worse than anything they had ever seen before. Villages were torn apart and 190 people died.

What happened differently? I was part of a team of researchers who spoke to people who had........

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