I feel that the usage of terms like “heat dome” and “polar vortex” obscure or distract from the human-centric causes of climate change. Lazy reasoning stops at these boogeyman terms. Welcome someone more familiar with linguistics to opine.
The terms are used by folks like NOAA, not just news trying to get ad eyeballs, so I think the accusation of "boogeyman terms" seems unfounded. They have no reason to mint scary terms.