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Forecasters in Indonesia Underestimated How Much El Niño Would Worsen Massive Forest Fires

Indonesia's president has ordered warships be deployed to help evacuate people from the worst-hit areas.
Imagen por Tamy Utari/EPA

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Indonesia's forecasters underestimated the El Niño weather event that has worsened the country's massive forest fires, which are blanketing Southeast Asia in a noxious, carbon-rich haze, a top government official said Wednesday.

"Our forecast was wrong," Luhut Panjaitan, the Cabinet minister managing Indonesia's response to the fires, told reporters.

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El Niño, a periodic warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean, has fueled a drought across the island nation. That's made it harder to stop the fires that have been pumping huge quantities of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, while shrouding much of the country and some of its neighbors in choking smog.

This year's El Niño is bigger than the 1997-98 event that drove similar wildfires — something Indonesia's BMKG meteorology agency failed to foresee, Panjaitan said.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo has ordered warships to begin evacuating children and people vulnerable to respiratory ailments from some of the worst-hit areas. Widodo has cut short a visit to the United States in response to the crisis, which increasingly is being viewed as a global environmental catastrophe.

For most of the past month, Indonesia's carbon emissions have shot far beyond those of the United States — an economy 20 times its size, according to a recent analysis by the US-based World Resources Institute. Observers say most of the 115,000-plus fires have been deliberately set to clear forests for palm oil, paper pulp, or timber plantations.

Related: Indonesia's Fires Are Emitting More Carbon Pollution Than the Entire US Economy

Reuters contributed to this report.