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orry boys, not a column about sex. Carrie Bradshaw does that. It'€™s about how God-awful hot it'€™s been for months and how inhumanely hazy it'€™s been for weeks for some of us.

Let'€™s start with the facts first. July is climatologically the warmest month of the year, yet the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces for July 2015 was 16.61˚ Celsius '€” the highest monthly temperature since 1880 '€” 0.08˚ higher than the previous warmest July in 1998 and 0.81˚ hotter than the average for the entire 20th century.

Do the globally averaged land and ocean numbers not register with your personal scale? In early July, London hit 37˚ Celsius and Paris 39˚, while thousands in Pakistan died amid heat wave weeks before July even knocked in. If you still don'€™t buy into global warming by now, frankly you deserve a trip to the Sahara desert with no more than a water bottle and the company of Republican presidential candidates.

In tropical Indonesia, the dry season usually means forest and peatland fires, either because it'€™s just so scorching the leaves self-incinerate or because humans, private and corporate, ignite fires for various reasons.

It occurs like clockwork and has gone on longer than we care to remember, yet hasn'€™t been resolved effectively regardless of who runs the government (thus, it is unfair to squarely blame President Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo for this). Every year, Sumatra and Kalimantan get covered in hazardous smoke, Singapore and Malaysia get mad at us, we get the blame game going until rainy season thunder rolls in and everyone moves on to brace for the next disaster.

With this year'€™s exceptionally warm temperatures, the fires are ranging longer and wilder, churning out haze and smoke that is practically engulfing two of our main islands and closest neighbors. Airports open and close, business gets disrupted, respiratory illnesses arise and schools go on indefinite recess '€” though it pays to note that Malaysia ordered their schoolchildren to stay home long before our authorities eventually took the initiative.

The current administration is gung-ho about penalizing the culprits, deploying military to go after big plantations. I'€™m all about upholding law to the fullest extent, but this is where it gets hazier, pardon the pun.

A handful of studies came to my attention lately, in which they explained how there were many types of perpetrators responsible for land burning in Indonesia, with the biggest offenders being smaller plantations and individual landowners in rural areas.

I am inclined to believe those studies. Just look at your own neighborhood, I bet there'€™s at least one person burning trash or the residue of it. Indonesians love to burn garbage for the simplistic reasons of practicality and '€œpurity'€, even if the impure smoke chokes their own lungs during the process.

Done nonchalantly, taught to housemaids religiously and passed down to grown kids like Grandma'€™s precious chinaware. Not just ignorant kampung dwellers, mind you, but also around the upscale neighborhoods of Kebayoran, Pluit and Menteng, not far from the State Palace.

The ride may have been upgraded to a Mercedes or Alphard but the trash handling largely remains stuck in a trailer park. Anyone sane enough to forbid it is typically met with shrugs or social backlash. Such callous attitude toward burning trash individually, no wonder not many bat an eye when it comes to burning land commercially.

Dragging in a few fat cats will get the public cheering, but changing people'€™s basic mindset is what brings a lasting change of affairs. People need to fathom that public burning of any kind is hazardous to the ecosystem, including humans in the vicinity, hence the legal punishment for doing so.

Children need to have this ingrained in them so as adults they won'€™t sanction land clearing by fire, or imperturbably pocketing a small fee from plantations to burn a peatland or two. Yet, is the government ballsy enough to go after the heavy affairs of regular folk burning trash and small businesses burning their way to clear land?

Many exasperated people in Sumatra and Kalimantan have lamented that as long as the smoke doesn'€™t debilitate the capital the government won'€™t get their act together, and I'€™m tempted to get that cynical now. Either haze paralyzes Jakarta or shames it by wrecking a high-profile event in a neighboring country that Jakarta has no choice but to pull out all the stops.

As I write this, Singapore'€™s star-studded F1 races and outdoor concerts are still on despite the haze, and by the time you'€™re reading this we'€™ll know if the sarcastic '€œThank you, Indonesia'€ social media posts originating in Singapore and Malaysia last week will have reached the momentum of a blistering hatefest against Indonesia as audiences, flocking from the region, are forced to enjoy Maroon 5 and Bon Jovi, the latter whom ironically had just played a sold-out concert in Jakarta, with N95 masks on.

Hot, check. Heavy, always. Monstrous and poisonous haze, maybe it'€™s time you swirl above Jakarta now.