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,........

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