Little climate knowledge is devastating

Scroll through any Pakistani WhatsApp group on a summer afternoon and you will almost certainly encounter it: a forwarded post, usually a screenshot of some foreign headline, announcing that El Niño will soon turn "Super". The message will tell you, with the confident authority of someone who has never read a meteorological report, that catastrophic heatwaves are imminent, that floods will swallow entire provinces, that cyclones are forming somewhere ominous, that crops will fail across continents. By the time it reaches you, the original source has been buried under six layers of forwarding. Nobody asks where it came from. Nobody wonders whether it is true.

This is the texture of climate discourse in Pakistan today. Not inquiry. Not analysis. Alarm, rapidly laundered through social networks until it arrives as fact.

El Niño is a naturally recurring warming of surface waters in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. It disrupts atmospheric circulation in ways that produce different effects in different regions: droughts in some places, heavy rainfall in others, warmer winters elsewhere. Its impacts on South Asia are real but varied, mediated by many other factors. Whether a given El Niño event translates into disaster for Pakistan depends on its intensity, its timing, and the existing vulnerability of communities in its path. None of this complexity survives a WhatsApp forward. The nuance gets compressed into dread, and the dread gets shared.

What makes this particularly interesting, and frankly amusing in a grim way, is the social profile of those doing the sharing. Not long ago, climate change was routinely dismissed in these same circles as a Western conspiracy, a fiction designed to keep developing countries from industrialising, or a funding mechanism through which international NGOs extracted donor money and siphoned it into conferences at five-star hotels. These critiques were not entirely without merit at the edges, but they were deployed wholesale to reject climate science itself. Then something shifted. Climate change became fashionable. Suddenly the very people who once scoffed at it are its most enthusiastic evangelists, forwarding apocalyptic predictions with the same zeal they once reserved for dismissing them.

What changed was not their understanding. What changed was the social signal. Climate awareness now confers intellectual status in certain urban milieus, and status-seeking is a far more powerful motivator than scientific literacy. This does not make the underlying science less valid. It does mean that public conversation is being driven less by knowledge and more by herd instinct dressed up as concern.

This has produced a peculiar parallel phenomenon: the overnight climate expert. Pakistan has long had a consultancy culture that adapts briskly to wherever money and prestige happen to be flowing. For years, the fashionable specialty was environmental impact assessments, followed by corporate sustainability and green infrastructure. Now, with climate finance expanding globally, carbon accounting, greenhouse gas inventories and climate-smart development have become the new frontier. People who spent careers writing pollution control reports are presenting themselves as authorities on Paris Agreement compliance. The terminology has been absorbed more quickly than the underlying knowledge. This would be merely a commercial curiosity if it stayed within the consultancy world, but it does not. These figures appear on television panels, at university seminars and government conferences, speaking with the fluency of people who have been confident for longer than they have been correct. Pakistani media, stretched thin and incurious about verifying credentials, accommodates them readily. Expertise, in this ecosystem, becomes a function of visibility rather than substance.

The public absorbs the resulting confusion without the tools to sort it out. Ordinary Pakistanis were never properly educated about environmental pollution, a problem predating climate change by decades. Most people only began understanding air quality when Lahore's smog became impossible to ignore, when children developed respiratory problems, when winter mornings turned the colour of old cement. Understanding arrived through suffering, not education. Climate change is now being communicated through the same channel: fear rather than comprehension. Every flood, every heatwave, every glacial lake outburst is presented as evidence of one singular cause, without explaining the interplay of governance failures, infrastructure decay, poverty and institutional weakness that determines how severely a society is actually damaged.

Here is the question nobody on these panels seems willing to sit with: if climate change explains everything, why do wealthier countries with comparable climatic exposure manage disasters so much better? Why does the Netherlands manage floods while Sindh drowns? This is not a denialist question. It is the central one. The answer involves planning capacity, early warning systems, competent administration and public trust in institutions, none of which can be outsourced to the atmosphere. Attributing every disaster solely to climate change lets governments off the hook entirely and leaves the public with no framework for accountability.

The danger is not that Pakistanis are talking about climate change. The danger is the quality of what they are saying, and what they are being told. A population that understands climate change only as incoming catastrophe, without grasping its mechanisms or the distinction between what the climate does and what governance failures allow it to do, is not climate-literate. It is merely anxious. Anxiety without comprehension generates noise, not reform. It fills WhatsApp groups, not policy rooms.

Half-knowledge has always been more dangerous than ignorance, because ignorance at least knows its limits. Climate awareness without scientific depth may, in the long run, prove just as corrosive to public understanding as the denial it replaced.