Seven days, Aug. 28 through Sept. 3, produced more than 23 million metric tons of carbon from Indonesian fires, roughly 3.3 million tons a day [3][2]. The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service logged 20.7 million tons over the same week of 2015, so this year's week ran at least 11 percent above its strong El Nino analog [4][1]. Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the service, told AFP the emissions are "really extreme" and pointed to "the extent of the smoke and the haze and the air quality impacts" [6].
That comparison is between levels, not between seasons: this week burned harder than the matched week of 2015, but burned area and duration for the two years are not in the same evidence, so where the year finishes is a separate question.
On causation, the two analysts AFP quotes are careful. David Gaveau, who founded the Nusantara Atlas portal, said El Nino "does not ignite fires" but "creates the dry conditions that allow human-started fires to escape and become very large" [8]. Wahyu Perdana of Pantau Gambut said that when peat is drained, its stored organic material is converted into fuel [11]. Peatland is also why the fires resist extinguishing once lit [9]. El Nino describes the weather and the drainage describes the fuel, and only one of the two arrives with a forecast attached.
The impact counts deserve the same care as the emissions ones. An education ministry official said more than 1.4 million students had moved to remote classes as schools closed [13]. No enrolment denominator is published alongside it, so the figure counts disruption without telling you what share of the school system is involved. Emissions, for their part, measure combustion and not deposition. The evidence that the smoke arrived downwind sits in the air quality readings: a week of "very unhealthy" and "severely unhealthy" PM2.5 in the Philippines, where officials closed schools in cities and provinces [15], and an "unhealthy" reading in Singapore's central region [16].
Four countries are currently dealing with the effects at once [17][3]. The comparison years are 2015 and 2019, and the UN said this week that the current El Nino could turn out to be the strongest in four decades [5][7]. What carries into an ordinary year is the drained peat, and that is the input a haze plan can act on before the dry season starts.
