City Hall in George Town is only about 200m from the cyclist, yet the view is not as clear as it should be. – CHAN BOON KAI/The Star
THE suffocating heat, compounded by the thick haze, has exacerbated respiratory problems for those with underlying health issues.
As an asthmatic, I call this yearly period my “inhaler season”.
My only defences are an inhaler and a box of tissues.
The recent inter-monsoon thunderstorms brought some relief but after just two days of dry weather in a row, buildings less than 1km away will be less visible due to the haze.
Last week, while stoically tolerating my nasal congestion and breathing difficulties, I was relieved to read that meteorological data indicated a shift in the prevailing winds.
However, I was annoyed to read articles on politicians blaming the haze on sundry incidents like industrial smog, peat fires and open burning.
Do they really think villagers burning the daily leaf litter swept up around their homes can send Penang’s air pollutant index (API) reading up to levels of 155 (that’s regarded as “unhealthy”)?
When leaders think provincially, how do they expect the population at large to react?
According to data from the website of Asean Specialised Meteorological Centre (ASMC), no hotspots indicating substantial open burning are appearing in Malaysia, nor even in nearby Sumatra.
But about 1,500km north-northeast of Penang, satellites have registered hundreds of hotspots spread across thousands of hectares in eastern Myanmar and throughout Laos.
These hotspots were from farmers practising traditional slash-and-burn agriculture, which entailed large swathes of fallow land being cleared and then burned to enrich the soil with potassium and phosphate while killing pests.
The slash-and-burn technique has been practised for millennia.
Tilled land left to fallow becomes overgrown with weeds and wild shrubbery and is enriched with plant nutrients after the overgrowth is slashed and then burned during the dry season. For thousands of years, humanity has been doing this for patches of farmland.
But when cropland stretching to the horizons is burned like this, hazardous transboundary haze appears.
This is why, on days when the haze is excessive, the air smells of wood smoke.
During the variable wind conditions of our current inter-monsoon period, a southerly wind was blowing down from the Andaman Sea along Myanmar’s western coastline, so some of the smoke was carried to northern Malaysia.
But Thailand has been bearing the brunt of it, with Phuket’s API going past 200 and Chiang Rai, the northernmost city of Thailand, getting a severe API of past 800 at one point.
Part of the extreme slashing and burning is happening because the La Niña phenomenon, which tends to bring more rain to South-East Asia, is over.
Meteorologists around the world agree that we are now back to getting “normal” weather.
It was reported that a town in western Myanmar had experienced its hottest day in 44 years, at 43.8°C, according to the country’s meteorology and hydrology department.
Fortunately, the inter-monsoon winds have shifted and we are now getting strong gusts from the South China Sea.
But the haze is not over yet, and worse days are likely coming when the south-west monsoon kicks in around June.
That means the wind will start steadily blowing from Sumatra, which is also experiencing dry weather now, and their planters will be doing their slash-and-burn soon.
Though the south-west monsoon blows from the Indian Ocean, Sumatra has a mountain range called the Barisan Mountains, which stretches 1,700km from one end of the island to the other.
With its highest peak at 3,800m, this mountain range catches all the storm clouds from the Indian Ocean, so when the wind reaches Malaysia, it will be dry.
I recall a year before the Covid-19 pandemic when the haze was so bad that The Star issued journalists and photographers with N95 masks since we have to go outdoors to do our jobs. That was also a really hot year.
I remember Malaysia sending our firemen to Indonesia after the burning of farmland triggered forest fires.
The current haze is a warning and I wish our leaders would refrain from making superficial statements that don’t address the issue.
A transboundary haze needs a transboundary solution.
