Ten percent of 1.75 billion tons is about 175 million tons of greenhouse gas equivalents, released in roughly the first month of burning [19][13]. In 2015, more than three months of fire produced the full 1.75 billion tons [12], an average below 580 million tons a month [20], which puts month one of 2026 near 30 percent of that pace [21]. The monthly average is an arithmetic construction rather than a measurement: 1.75 billion tons is a season total, and Robert Field of Columbia University, who built the Global Fire Weather Database, is comparing the shape of the activity curve, which he describes as tracking sharply upward and similar to 2015 [10]. Neither number describes how much dried peat sits below the surface waiting to carry the smolder.
The pollutant argument rests on a set of ratios. By one estimate, peat fires produce three times the fine particulate matter of other tropical forest fires, five times the sulfur dioxide, three times the organic carbon, and twice the methane and carbon monoxide [3]. The NASA account introduces those figures as one estimate and names neither the study nor the unit of comparison [22]. A multiplier with no denominator, per hectare burned or per ton of fuel consumed, cannot be turned into an expected concentration for any particular city downwind.
Counting has the same problem in a different form. SiPongi, the Ministry of Forestry platform built on MODIS and VIIRS data, logged 946 hotspots on August 31 [17], and NASA's own description of its imagery notes that a single fire can register as several detections [5]. The number is a count of detections, not a census of fires. Both instruments also struggle to see fires hidden under thick smoke or cloud [18], and Indonesia's near-real-time picture leans on those sensors [23]. The useful part is that the error has a known direction: as the smoke thickens, the counter reads low.
This material offers no measurement of anyone's exposure: no air-quality readings, no health outcomes, no flight data appear in it. The historical statement is qualitative, that drought-driven fires over three decades have covered large areas in smoke for weeks and disrupted the lives of millions [7]. What is specific is the mechanism that ends it. Under normal conditions the peat in Kalimantan, Sumatra and Papua is too wet for fire to travel underground, and drought is what opens it [15]; Field's view is that once fire is in the peat it will not stop until the rains arrive in October or November [16]. Rainfall, not firefighting, determines the length of this exposure window.
