A warning against complacency
Sarwono Kusumaatmadja, Indonesia's environment minister, last week spoke with honesty unusual in the Indonesian government, regarding the catastrophic fires spreading through the country. "We were operating on business as usual", Sarwono said. "We ignored the warnings, with dire consequences. Now Indonesia is facing a disaster scenario. It is a warning for other nations not to be complacent."
The disaster is mainly the result of earlier environmental damage caused by "business as usual" — also known as corporate greed.
The most immediate cause is the rapid clearing of Indonesia's natural forest in recent decades. Moisture-retaining vegetation has been replaced, at best, by plantations which lack the fire resistance of the natural cover.
The repressive and corrupt character of the Indonesian dictatorship has made it even easier than "normal" for the companies involved to ignore every environmental consideration in their pursuit of profits. Indeed, even as the government banned companies from using fire to clear land, the Straits Times reported on September 21 that the number of fires increased sharply as companies sought to get in ahead of enforcement of the restrictions.
The Indonesian fires are so severe because of the widespread drought, which is also affecting Papua New Guinea and parts of Australia. Droughts inevitably recur from time to time, and, as Sarwono indicated, it is a very foolish complacency to count on the normal monsoonal rains always to prevent the worst consequences of environmental vandalism.
But the foolish complacency doesn't end there. Weather scientists associate the drought with a developing El Niño — the disruption of usual patterns of wind, temperature and pressures in the Southern Pacific Ocean that leads to drought in this part of the world and abnormally high rainfall in South America.
Meteorologists are a long way from fully understanding the causes of an El Niño, and there are not even reliable records of earlier occurrences going back very far in history. But what is known is cause for concern.
The largest El Niño previously known occurred in 1982-83; in the present occurrence, still at a very early stage, water temperatures in the eastern Pacific have already risen nearly as much as then.
Such a large and complex phenomenon of course has many causes, and science at its present stage cannot hope to provide "proof" of how much any particular factor contributes to an El Niño. This lack of certainty is a source of comfort for those who, for any reason, want to deny that human activity is altering the climate of our planet: maybe this El Niño hasn't been affected significantly by global warming; maybe the warming is part of a normal variation that would have occurred even without human activities; maybe the warming isn't really happening.
But "maybe" is not a cause for complacency — in Indonesian forests or in any other aspect of environmental protection. It is a scientific certainty that increasing the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere will modify the earth's climate; the uncertainty concerns only the — important — details of how great that modification will be. John Howard may be right that some of the Pacific islands won't be submerged by rising sea levels in 50 years' time; but if he's wrong, he won't be here to say he's sorry (not that he's inclined to apologies anyway).
As for those who demand "proof" of catastrophe before they will accept any limitation on the pursuit of profits, we can point to undoubted proof of the results of complacency about business as usual: it's the pall of smoke now choking Indonesia and its neighbours.