WE HAVE turned the world’s third-largest rainforest region into a tinderbox that the warming world will help ignite. So concludes a new study of forest fires in Sumatra and Borneo in Indonesia.
Robert Field, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Toronto in Canada, and his colleagues examined the fire history of forests in Indonesia by analysing five decades of visibility records at nearby airports. Droughts – usually during El Niño seasons in the Pacific – have triggered huge fires in Indonesia seven times since 1960. But Field’s team found that until 1980 the fires were limited to Sumatra,…
