IS climate really changing? Experts say ‘yes’ and they come out with statistics that we mortals cannot understand much less refute. But to a man like me, nothing has changed. My city experiences horrible heat in summer, as when I was a boy, and now. The monsoon visits this city annually and pours rain, and streets are flooded as before.

When winter comes, it is as cold as when I was young. Outside my city, I find the same consistency in the weather pattern in other parts of Pakistan. There is heavy snow in Kashmir, northern Punjab and parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, and the sea breeze along Balochistan coast is still there, as it had always been.

Karachi, too, remains the same. If it rains it is a storm, as always, or there is no rain. This is the case now and was the case when I was there as a young man. Each year there is a flood in Pakistan, though of course the intensity of the flood varies from year to year, as it did in the past.

Outside Pakistan, I hear in newspapers and see on TV weather disasters striking this country or there. There are regular storms and floods in China, the Philippines and Bangladesh, and each winter is an ordeal for Europe and North America. Last winter snow brought a halt to life in Germany and other parts of Europe, and there is no evidence, at least to me, that Russia is now less cold than it was earlier.

Each year, the Great Wall of China is draped white in snow, the winter in Afghanistan and Anatolia is Siberian, and water freezes in the Bosporus.

For once, America’s mercurial president is right. There is no evidence of climate change, and to me at least he has done the right thing by walking out of the Paris accord.

Azeem Ahmad Munshi
Lyallpur

Published in Dawn, June 7th, 2018