Just To Balance Things Out, SE Asia Also Choking On Smoke From Flaming Forests & Peat

[hatrack]

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A fire in a national park in Borneo. Thousands of wildfires are burning in Indonesia, most of them set deliberately to clear land for agriculture.

Brazil has captured global attention over deliberately set fires that are burning the Amazon rainforest, often called the earth’s lungs. Now Indonesia is compounding the concern with blazes to clear forest on the other side of the world.

Hundreds of wildfires burned across Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra on Tuesday, producing thick clouds of smoke that disrupted air travel, forced schools to close and sickened many thousands of people. Poorly equipped firefighters were unable to bring them under control. Officials said that about 80 percent of the fires were set intentionally to make room for palm plantations, a lucrative cash crop that has led to deforestation on much of Sumatra.

The slash-and-burn conflagrations, which tore through sensitive rainforests where dozens of endangered species live, immediately drew comparisons to the wildfires in the Amazon basin that have destroyed more than 2 million acres.

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Indonesia’s disaster management agency identified 2,900 hot spots throughout the country.



EDIT

Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, visited an area of Sumatra on Tuesday that has been among the hardest hit and said the government would seed clouds in the hope of bringing rain. He also said he would pray for rain.

Ed. - Stupidity - spanning the globe!!

EDIT

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/world/asia/indonesia-fires-photos.html

[progree]

1. Indonesia really is on the other side of the world from Brazil, almost exactly - antipodes map

Now Indonesia is compounding the concern with blazes to clear forest on the other side of the world.

https://www.peakbagger.com/PBGeog/worldrev.aspx

The map on this page allows you to approximately locate the place directly on the other side of the world from anywhere. The complementary red and black outlines are reversed, so that a place in the right place on the black outline map is directly opposite the place on the red outlines. The red outline map is "upside down", with south at the top, so it may be a little confusing to locate places on it.

For example, you can look in the Indian Ocean area of the black outline map, and you can see there the USA in red, upside down between the black outlines of Africa and Australia. If your geography is adequate, you can tell that the furthest away place from New York in the world is a spot a few hundred miles southwest of Perth, Australia, off in the Ocean.