Stop blaming the child

"El Nino drying up Sarawak" - The Star, 4th August 2009.

El Nino - the child or the little boy, depending how you do your Spanish translation is apparently causing havoc to the Malaysian weather again.

But easily, El Nino then gets the blame for all the haze that we are having.

That is like spoiling the child, and then blaming the child for being spoilt.

The haze is caused by open burning.

Nothing else.

No special weather phenomena.

I am no scientist or weather expert myself, so like everyone else, I consult the trusted WWW on this. According to the wiki:

El Niño is a combination of atmospheric and oceanic phenomena in the tropical Pacific Ocean. It is manifested in the atmosphere by changes in the pressure difference between Tahiti and Darwin, Australia, and in the ocean by warming of surface waters of the tropical Eastern Pacific Ocean.

The oscillation does not have a single well-defined period but instead occurs every three to eight years. The name is from the Spanish for "the little boy", refers to the Christ child, because the phenomenon is usually noticed around Christmas in the Pacific near South America.

A period of cooling in the tropical Pacific is the opposite extreme in the natural ENSO cycle and is called La Niña. The phenomenon often is abbreviated in scientific usage as ENSO and in popular usage is commonly called simply El Niño.

The mechanisms that sustain the El Niño - La Niña cycle remain a matter of research, but El Nino is associated with disruption of Pacific trade winds and a stronger than usual so-called Madden-Julian oscillation, which is the frequent and regularly occurring eastward progression of tropical rainfall over the Pacific.

El Niño is associated with floods, droughts and is linked to other weather disturbances in many locations around the world. El Niño's effects in the Atlantic Ocean lag behind those in the Pacific by 12 to 18 months. Developing countries dependent upon agricultural and fishing are especially affected.

El Niño's effects on weather vary with each event. Recent research suggests that treating ocean warming in the eastern tropical Pacific separately from that in the central tropical Pacific may help explain some of these variations.

So, I do not see a consistent story between what they say in Malaysia. In Malaysia, El Nino is a code word for haze and open burning. It does not occur every 3-5 years nor near Christmas time, it occurs when there is haze and open burning. The Malaysian El Nino is caused by a phenomena that is called match stick and dry leaves.

We continuously keep allowing people to burn openly, whether it is dry leaves on their lawns or dry dead trees in their farms or old dead palm trees in their plantations.

We continuously blame slash and burn activities but we do not teach people new methods of planting.

We continuously blame the palm oil industry but we also promote and continue to buy palm products.

Stop blaming the little kid, start taking some of the blame ourselves . . . then maybe, just maybe, we can improve.

Take care and be well.