Hazed and Confused

The haze is getting to us.

Our morning routine typically consists of hauling ourselves out of bed around 10am (it's a rough life), grabbing a few water bottles out of the kitchen, and remarking about the weather.

"The haze looks like it lifted."
"Probably because of the rain."

"The haze is back again."
"Let's not leave the house today."

We have to go into the open-air hallway to get to the kitchen, so the weather kind of slaps us in the face as soon as we break the subpar seal of our air conditioned sanctuary of a bedroom.

We heard it was going to be bad this year. Actually, we heard that it was already bad this year. But we hadn't really noticed. Until recently.  There's a fun building we can usually see on our way to breakfast or the gym every morning. It looks like something out of Sim City and I enjoy imagining someone on their desktop computer controlling everything about Petaling Jaya and Kuala Lumpur - trading resources and building parks.  But lately we haven't been able to see the building from where we live. The haze has gotten much too terrible.

It is blowing in from Indonesia, where peat fields are burning for no real reason.  The burning and subsequent haze is even worse during dry years in Southeast Asia. This is not only harmful for the people living in haze areas (you know, me and the rest of the hundreds of millions of people here), but it is also harmful to the ozone layer. According to a report on Nature.com, "estimated carbon emissions from these 1997-98 fires were... equivalent to 13-40% of annual global fossil fuel emissions at that time."  And it's not getting any better. According to the same report, "in 2013... fires in Indonesia generated atmospheric pollution that exceeded the previous 1997-98 records over Singapore."

How is this happening, you might ask. Good question. It looks like (similar to most bad, harmful things in this world) big corporations and plantations are to blame. Peat bogs are sometimes drained in order to make room for farming and under the right (dry) circumstances, peat will burn indefinitely. Some peat fires have been burning in Indonesia since 1997. See the pretty map below.

Smoke and pollution from Indonesian fires, 1997.

Now I don't know if any of you have lived in a country with this much pollution on top of this much smoke haze, but I might be able to paint a good picture for you.

Below you will see the area where most of my readers live: Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.  While there are some places with abnormally high air quality indexes (probably because of factories), most areas hover around the 20s or 30s.  Even large cities don't have terrible ratings (around 50).

Now this picture shows where I'm living in Malaysia. This is updated from yesterday, one of the worst days we have had with haze since we have gotten here. All the numbers are above 100. Which is exactly why my eyes are burning while writing this post in an outdoor cafe. 

Curious about air quality in other places? Click here.

So let's just say the haze is getting to us. Between the phlegm, burning eyes, heavy chest, and coughing - we are about done with the dry season. The good news is that at least Indonesia has apologized for it...