The seeding claim deserves a slow read. BNPB's spokesman, Berton Suar Pelita Panjaitan, said operations this week prompted light to moderate rain over eastern and southern Sumatra and western Kalimantan [8], and in the same statement said implementation depends heavily on atmospheric conditions and on rain-bearing clouds sitting over the target areas [7]. Both are true, and together they describe an evaluation problem rather than a result: the clouds you can seed are the clouds closest to raining. Particles of silver iodide or salt go in to trigger precipitation [17], rain follows, and there is no unseeded cloud drawn from the same population on the same afternoon to set beside it. That is not a reason to ground the aircraft, particularly when ground and air task forces are extinguishing and cooling regardless [20]. It is a reason not to read the rainfall as a measured return on the 8,000 kilograms of salt scattered on Wednesday alone [9].
The health figure has a similar shape. Divide the two-month tally of treated respiratory infections by the 62 days of July and August and it is about 220 people a day [1]; set it against the exposed population and it is roughly 27 per 10,000 [2]. What that counts is people who reached a clinic and were written down. The coughs and colds Katharina Abi described in her one- and five-year-old, brought to a Palangkaraya shelter as smoke thickened around their house [21], enter the count only if someone treated them. There is also no smoke-free July in the series to compare against. Deputy Health Minister Dante Saksono Harbuwono's warning that prolonged exposure to toxic air can bring serious long-term complications [19] points at precisely the part a two-month tally cannot see.
The suppression arithmetic makes the mismatch of scales concrete. More than 4 million litres of water poured on burning areas in recent weeks [10] is a great deal of water and a very thin film over the ground it is fighting for: spread evenly across the 200,000-plus hectares burned since January, it works out to 20 litres a hectare, about two thousandths of a millimetre deep [5]. The two windows do not line up, and nobody would spread it that way, since water goes onto active fronts and hotspots where it can stop an advance. The ratio is still the useful thing to hold, because it is the ratio between a targeted tool and a regional airshed.
WALHI's Indra Syahnanda said he hopes the government will address the root causes of a haze that returns every year [14], and most of these fires are attributed to slash-and-burn clearing for agriculture [15]. The atmospheric half of the trap is tighter than the political half. El Nino is felt in Indonesia mainly as drought [18], and this one has been dubbed "Godzilla" [c13b]; the dry air that cures the peat and scrub is also the air with the fewest rain-bearing clouds in it, and a rain-bearing cloud is the one input seeding cannot manufacture.
