politics but the president's senior advisor jenna alice just said kamel paris sounds like me says she doesn't mean it as a compliment at that as an ordinary suburban housewife who felt a little disrespect i mean i teach my children that to name call santa. i was going to say. 2 that i'm afraid they believe that. yes indeed we did have to bleep that expletive omarion evanston and you're up to date on d.w. news thanks for watching. i'm middle and i'm good call complacency the only good sense of the planet on the brink of disaster we did long in-depth interviews with experts about one question how all of the changes that have hit the reset.

the other for the cut corners. are. enormous again among the reporting called get it. all over the world and make a fires are destroying entire towns and reach your. circle. like a freight train coming torture. these compounds. magnifiers are different they are beyond our control they are insatiable see here did they get what the piece else since some partner clear to us said. might as well

be dropping wet paper dollar bills from your airplanes for all the good it's going to do on the fire. we are in conflict with nature but why has it unleashed this inferno on our forests and homes. in many areas we're literally sitting on a powder keg we need to face some tough truth. scientists and firefighters are taking up the challenge with new methods. this is the missile fire services laboratory the entire building is filled with people studying fire. going from $10.00 off air on this to this couple. also under scrutiny our own role in creating this crisis. because a little of the fire of social problems the 20 years before when nobody goodwin management. it's really up to humans to figure out how to rebalance everything and

we can do that it's a race against time to save our habitat and our lives and we have but 20 years to get the needed work done. how can we survive the new era of mega fires. may 1st 2016 in fort mcmurray canada. a forest fire starts belching out smoke but for people in this prosperous oil sands town it's business as usual.

living here is you get used to forest fires and you get used to smoke from a big part of the summer and so nobody really worries when small craft floats and to town. but this time the town was faced with a mega fire. and suddenly 911 alarm went off it was actually. the city dispatcher who said hey it looks like this fire is going to make contact with the city we need your help and our captain said well what do you need how much do you need and they said send everything everything right you have nobody has ever said send everything. and nobody expected the fire to attack people's homes. the very 1st place we were dispatched was this area in. terrorism about 5 minutes after we took this short 10 2nd video there was 10 houses on fire.

a 1000 firefighters were mobilized from all over canada. but they were powerless before the destructive force of what locals called the beast. in just a few days 3 suburbs were burnt to ashes. just constant loss day after day after day and it's really wasn't safe for us to be in there anymore. but here we are leaving the room to vote. count there. you know i'm going to dodge i can feel the fear this in theory fully.

88000 people the whole town ran for their lives if you agree. we're an industry town based on oil and based on shift work so in the middle of the day there's thousands of people that could be sleeping. we started knocking on doors we use the speaker systems on our cars are allowed healers the city was announcing that it was time to leave. you can see the big red line that runs through the middle as our highway 63 and that's the main highway through town it's the only way out. everyone was trying to get out of the same time the gas stations were running out of gasoline i had like a quarter of a tank of gas that we were panicked about and then as we got maybe 40 minutes out of town everything hit me and i realized. i might never see you

again. adrian and everyone else spent a month in emergency shelters. nobody died and not fire and that is the absolute best we could hope for to get everybody out and save those lives. were the beast swallowed several 1000 homes and 5000 square kilometers of forest were actually nearly $10000000000.00 canadian dollars it was the most destructive wildfire in the history of canada. even worse the beast was not an exception but it is part of a global trend. uncontrollable make a farmers have struck in canada and in california they are burning millions of acres in the amazon and are threatening lives. in europe russia and even siberia

they have reached china indonesia and australia the world's forests are on fire. at this center in brussels the european union monitors emergencies around the globe from earthquakes and floods to volcano outbreaks and tropical cyclones. but a 3rd of all emergency calls are for wildfires and the very if you want. forest fires in italy continue to affect the south there are regions of the kountry particular city firefighter claire cover left ski has firsthand experience battling flames now she helps european countries tackle wildfires. 3 supposed to but i want to hold this sure didn't tell you. i want to act out of

control to keep the. old dream zonal divorce shit on here or in some tender for me is childish when they were little god. ought. to get more in performance he was just doing. mega fires can be seen from space. europe satellites are on far watch and capturing some worrying trends. in that almost kind of on the political of the national into the pimply folk to the issue leagues up to date guys on the media even to produce some pass on the phone this idiot asked me to do this if it for a. more extreme fires also struck in portugal and spain. the length of the foot on the fair it's

a beautiful it was of untreated season for troy taken in addition scholorship. fires are now striking all year round in california we salt to shoot blazes in november and over christmas. jim fetch me compared to yesterday twice as much forested land to fountain sweet and. unexpectedly mega fires are also threatening new territories in the north on the meat is really good sometimes where on strayed away you mean on that my you put on your mate when you can see if he can shed one of some perfect us a few no men want to do it. for you. it's a time when you were to sit down yes i mean. all. all over the world the fires are pushing our resources to the limits of.

trade fairs for aerial firefighting like here in france all for a growing arsenal of weapons for the war against far. but the new technology. like simulators virtual reality and chemical flame retardants does not come cheap. e.u. countries are now spending $2000000000.00 euros a year on firefighting the u.s. is spending more than $2000000000.00. but can technology protect us from mega fires. we have very large airplanes very large helicopters lots of equipment on the ground lots of people fire engines all of that and there is no trend that we can say that indicates

that we will ever be able to control extreme wildfire. like the swedish government which called in the army to stop a fire by bombing it in. the rush of air from the explosion snuffed out the fire. but are we winning the battle and losing the war. and some folks wonder if we just beef up fire suppression a little bit more more tankers more fire crews more retardant bombers we can deal with wildfire effectively the evidence says otherwise the return on our investment with expanding fire suppression investment in the u.s. is actually declining. are getting less effect of us so we're pretty clear we can't solve this with our suppression alone. if you.

can we find a different strategy to save our forests and our habitat. today a wildfire is a hungry beast that devours forests and it wasn't always like that it was a friend of man once upon a time. far ecologist paul his bird is an internationally renowned expert who has dedicated several decades to the question of why the fires are becoming more extreme. so the bottom line is that we need to face some tough truths. and this starts with a trip into the past to the time when european settlers arrived in the us. and the

new what happens immediately expose the forest to a higher fire risk as they set up logging operations constructed homesteads and lit fires to cook food and clear land. new technology further increase the fire risk. there are 4 major road lines that are crisscrossing the country east to west from north to south and the trains in the heat of the summer would give up spark said and they would often spread into nearby slash and grasses and so fires would start with the passage of grain. the turning point was the 910 big burn. not. $910.00 was a year of drought then a sudden wind whipped up some small fires into a giant blaze all across idaho montana and washington state.

this catastrophe would fundamentally change our approach to far fighting. a witness left a testimony. the canyon seemed to act as chimneys through which the wind and fire swept with the roar of a 1000 freight trains. and you really thought that it was the end of the world. this search for survivors and bodies went on for weeks. the big burn was the largest fire in u.s. history in just 2 days it destroyed $3000000.00 acres of forest and $1000000000.00 worth of timber. 87 people lost their lives the community was left traumatized. it paralyzed us with a fear of wild fire suddenly a wildfire becomes public enemy number one in the united states.

a new enemy needs a new type of defense in the u.s. and in canada a new firefighting service declared war on far. the united states forest service people love to. smoke jumpers. fire fighters. a deadline was set all fires were to be put out by 10 am the next morning. they had to develop a machine a mechanism to be able to do that so there was new training programs and firefighting crews that had to be developed and methods had to be developed to successfully deploy people safely and put fires out. and we got so good at it that we were able to put out 95 to 98 percent of all wildfires coast to coast every single year.

as most of the fires were caused by humans the all forties recruited the general population into the war against fires with the help of a very special mascot. remember you prevent forest fires. you are. i think. fire suppression worked for a really long time from let's say 935 to 198550 years of hyper success then after 985 we see acres burned going back up just like before the pre fire suppression era where was this benefit of

fire suppression it was going away it was looking like a leaky bucket. like to show us something i've got these great panoramic photos showing this landscape from the 1930 s. and then again today and what we see is in the 1930 s. there was so far fewer trees maybe 10 or 20 percent of the trees that we see today . and why did that happened. the small and medium size fires were really frequent on this landscape and they played an incredibly important role there burning up dead wouldn't sending out trees you had this patchwork of burned and recovering and forested area

so this limited the frequency of the really large fires because fires would run into already burned places where the fuel was consumed and so they couldn't get big that often. that patchiness is gone from the landscape during that period of 100 years when we kept fire out of the woods all sorts of trees of different sizes and species from seedlings and saplings to small poles they filled in the spaces between the big trees and they created what we call a fuel ladder to vast areas have these fuel ladders they convey fire from the forest floor up through the branches and into the canopies of the large trees now you add a continuous puff of wind to that and that wildfire can spread through the canopy for hector after hector after hector.

california and greece in 2018 fort mcmurray in 2016 black saturday in australia. all these fires spread out of control because humans stacked the furnace with decades of accumulated fuel. and now yet another manmade factor is bringing things to a head. my 1st experience of fireworks was when i was one year old it was my birthday i had a birthday cake and one candle and i was drawn to that plame like a ma and i stuck my finger in the flame and started to holler and cry but because i was so fast i kept my finger in the flame and ever since then

i've been studying fire. my clan again has uncovered the complex relationship that exists between fire and climate. for him that's the secret to what happened in fort mcmurray. in canada our area burned has doubled since the seventy's and my colleagues and i attribute this to human caused climate change. in winter arboreal forests are covered with snow but instead of the snow melting slowly and the yser soaking into the ground now because of climate change the snow is melting rapidly and a lot of oyster runs off so there's not enough moisture for the trees and the vegetation during the growing season making them more prone to drought during the summer. for each degree of warming trees would need 20

percent more water but because of drought the opposite happens. and with climate change comes hotter and drier summers which means trees lose more moisture through transpiration in other words even more water evaporates from the leaves into the atmosphere. now the trees can defend themselves by shutting down the pores. but when they do this they don't grow as well making them more susceptible to disease and fire. the impact can be seen not only in canada but all over the globe. an example is the ideal it scenery of lake tahoe on the border between california and nevada.

here drought has taken a terrible toll and multiplied the fire risk. there was an article back in april that listed the 10 most risk towns in california particularly in the sierra nevada and speech was listed as one of. a forest and conservation biologist at the university of california patricia maloney is investigating a huge catastrophe that has befallen forests in the u.s. canada and in europe when the drought started hitting in 2015 i was really curious and want to know why and how some trees were dying. this is a 12 trap for capturing bark beetles and this lure here attracts the mountain pine

beetle and bark beetles for the most part have very poor sight and they're thinking it's a tree and so they fly over here and then they can't fly out once they catch you're down to get into the funnel and then they fall down into the cut below. so today in this track we've captured about 35 to 50 mountain pine beetle in 2016 in this location each week over the course of 4 weeks we captured between 500 to a 1000 in pine beetle. and those beetles know how to plan a mass invasion. here we have a drought affected tree and when they're stressed by drought they'll emit f. lean and this and beetles go by smell so they smell that the tree is stress because they can smell that ethylene so they come moving towards this tree to try to attack

it and then once you have enough bark beetles that are trying to invade a tree they in turn send pheromone a chemical that basically tells all their friends to come over party in this tree. we see a number of pitch tubes here and you can see there are many pits tubes that go all the way up this and then you see all these streaming pitch coming down and that's a physical defense of the tree trying to pitch out and wall off the bark beetle from getting inside the tree and killing it. this tree is still alive right now it's still trying to defend itself. but drought leaves other trees to dry to produce any resin at all free entry to the party. you get thousands of beetles in there and they begin to compromise water uptake and

so between a drought event and massive amounts of bark beetles this tree is just about dead. just in california beetles have invaded and killed an estimated 120000000 trees. in europe as well heat waves and droughts have caused waves of deadly beetle attacks in france spain and even scandinavia more fodder for the next beast on the problem. in many areas we're literally sitting on a powder keg the area burned in the u.s. by wildfires and 2002 today is going to double or triple in the next 30 years. but even the biggest powder keg will only

explode if the fuse is lit what makes forest fires go off. so this is the the famous 2 minute canadian match dropped us which really is the foundation of our system you had to go off into the bush like we just did and light a wooden match put it down and watch it for 2 minutes. mike wotton is an eminent research scientist working for the canadian forest service his specialty fire behavior. this this one didn't spread it was only the match burning and so this tells me that this fuel is not flammable today. but i can tell how quickly this took off that the fuels are very foul flammable here so this area would be at a high fire risk. starting shortly after the big

burn the canadian scientists performed no less then 30000 match tests over 30 years to one cover the hidden mechanism of flammability. the basis of how fire spreads all comes down to what we call the fire triangle. on one side of this triangle we have oxygen we need oxygen to burn on another side we need fuel. to burn as well and on the other we have. energy a source of heat and so we need all of these 3 sides of the triangle for fire to continue i take one of them away and that reaction doesn't work anymore and your fire goes out. the canadian scientists are the inventors of an ingenious system of universal warning signs. in. countries all across the globe that have adopted the system. more mega fires are

coming our way. but once ignited how does a fire grow into a raging mega fire that is beyond human control. we've come to montana science of the big burn in 1010 to unravel the innermost mechanisms of far. so this is the missile fire sciences laboratory the entire building is filled with people studying fire many different aspects of fire ecology atmospheric science smoke and mystery and fire behavior. this is one of the largest and oldest fire labs in the world. here scientists get right inside the mind of fires like the beast to find out hell the feed themselves.

physicists are burned chamber this is where we do many kinds of experiments burning different kinds of fuels and all of them produce a lot of smoke that's why we have to have a very large ventilation system to remove all that smoke. this apparatus is a big stone talking sam burner we call it big sandy it consists of a sand box here in the middle where we pump gas so we can control exactly the characteristics of the flames. this is very much like an arbitrary segment of a large while and fire that's spreading outward and so what we're trying to understand with this apparatus is how the heat is transferred. to go ahead and every minute counts when fighting a while far crews can only save lives and homes if they are in the right place at the right time but until recently fire spread could not be predicted for more than

30 minutes in advance. because it's mechanism was unknown. now mark and his team have solved the ancient riddle. to see very clearly those peaks and troughs and those are actually key to how fires behave how fires spread flame gases are very low density and they want to rise up but in order for them to rise cold air has to come down and replace the volume vacated by that rising parcel hot air. that sets up a repeating pattern of hot flames rising cold air descending heart flame driving cold air in the center. and it's in the troughs where the cold air is descending that it's pushing flames down into the fuel. and this forces them into the fresh fuel just ahead of the flame front advances.

if this fire did not have the peak and trough out he would not get it to spring. finally the secret is unravels of how fire spreads well like wildfire. this paves the way for a new generation of fire science and better strategies for those battling the flames on the front line. is going to be hot. over and i have to give ray-bans for everybody yeah ok. we're going to have the rest of the fun folks go through does anyone read. the full ratios appetite of today's make the fires knows no boundaries the secret behind this airflow and wind. combustion specialist several

mcalister has found a way to simulate the process. first she simulates an ordinary while far. so now i let it burn a little bit here when you can see it is a lot of unburned fuel in there so it's not burning very well. the plume of the fire is narrow so the flames can pull in fresh replacement air from all sides. but then a question in here. no using a chimney service simulates the air flow of a mega fire. burns much faster much more clearly or get spark enough that i can follow it ever. so you can hear the flow that it creates. this flow is the result of an astonishing mechanism as the fuels accumulate and you get more and more fuel down on the ground they burn longer so instead of having a simple line of fire you end up with an area of fuel that's on fire so as that area gets bigger and bigger the plume above it gets wider and wider the. hot air

rushes upwards and forms a natural chimney which blocks the air coming in from above and the sides instead the fire sucks in fresh air from down below generating strong winds on the ground. the fire creatures very young when to machine to fan the flames. thereby sensually blowing on the coals of the fire and if you've ever played with a campfire and you blew out you blow on and you can see it close a lot hotter and stuff that was already in funding is going to burn much faster stuff that was smoldering is going to transition to flames and so you're going to involve more fuels that are going to burn out that when. a mega fire is for. the rising heat and when turbulence can even spin into far tornadoes so-called far

nato's which going to reach. the force of a hurricane and temperatures of a $1000.00 degree celsius. in the age of mega fires far nato's are becoming more and more common. there. let's see how this wind machine led to the inferno in fort mcmurray. they have the power to send embers in lightning far ahead of the fire sparking new ignitions all over the region. and. firefighters on the ground were overwhelmed and faced with tough decisions. this area sits on a kind of a corner you go left to a buffalo and right to dickens field and we had to choose if we were going to

defend would buffalo. and we're dickens field. we decided to defend the dickens field stretch of forest and we ended up being able to stop the fire from getting into that neighborhood and we felt pretty good about ourselves we felt like heroes actually we felt like superheroes and that well meant and we packed up our hoses we drove around the corner and toward buffalo only to discover that 60 houses from fire. that was a difficult moment for us logically we look back and decision we made was the right right doesn't always make you feel better though. the fire of fort mcmurray has been studied by scientists all around the globe and. their investigations reveal that the impact doesn't stop here.

we will see. so in jim ogle stare lazy horny this season and we heard in the news that there was a very intense fires going on in the northwest canada. sirrah gaikai canada is from russia and a specialist in the impact of volcanic eruptions. but the air of make of fires has expanded his field of study. i thought why not check whether we see something can fly the measurements here at the station. measure objects by bouncing laser beams off them. laser beam comes out of their jets computer through this universe and then it is sent to the beam expand their of it of course for the beam expands and then descend into the atmosphere and then be was a telescope to get the scattered signal back from as high as one. can just.

and that's how we get information on the composition of the atmosphere. in addition to the light our at the station sergey also used the space based calypso lidar which covers the entire globe. when i assure you checked of the data from the lakers i saw something really extraordinary these invent spiders in general. they send lots of small can i say into the stratosphere and then these plumes they crossed the atlantic even just one week and arrived in europe. passing through europe on its way east the smoke created a series of stunning sunsets. and only smoke went

further to the side. syria and then crossed the globe in only 2 weeks and we have been seeing it is for us here for at least 7 months that followed far. this is assuming that comes off the mother it will kind of option and this one is from this mega fire event it's been since you who found that the wildfires can have as last year booked on the atmosphere as the mothers will conquer options. sergei was the 1st scientist to discover that the reach of mega fires is global and out of the ordinary. every fire season our entire airspace fills up with smoke. we urgently need to find

out more about the chemical composition of what we're taking in with every breath. nasa has launched an international air borne science expedition to investigate the potential impact of this new type of pollution. one of the mission controllers is bob jocose and from montana university who has dedicated his life to understanding wild fire smoke. this plane is the world supposed to beds fly laboratory the summary of the flight plan for today is to head to the shirt in fires southern arizona. there the team members are planning to collect fresh smoke samples for their research with the help of pioneering prototypes. you have to bring the lab to the fire to the smoke to better understand the thousands of chemicals that are emitted fresh smoke

and then how those changed as the. smoke evolves in the atmosphere. when the plane reaches the smoke plume we get strong turbulence. caused by the hot air rising from the far. when we're flying really big fires and you have to make when you 1st like that it can feel like you're on a roller coaster which is fine but you don't want to be on a roller coaster for 8 hours it's kind of a high intensity type of work but it's also awesome being able to see the measurements that we're making in real time. the full analysis of all the new data it will take years but bob is already sounding the alarm bells the health risks links to while far smoke are enormous. there's a lot of concerns about smoke for instance the particles are solid or liquid

droplets and they can clog the passageways in your lungs and they can also inject poison into your bloodstream along with the toxic gases and when those poisons get in your bloodstream it actually changes your biochemistry and your body and that can lead to heart disease there's even a statistic called premature deaths we know that these premature deaths increase as pollution increases. in our fire prone world risk for a tour of diseases including asthma are on the increase. and a vital activity like breathing is becoming a deadly risk. and.

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