Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Danielle, and thank you for stepping in for Simon. We wish him and his team well in dealing with the events of last evening. I recognize a lot of friends and partners and associates here. In just a moment, I'm going to invite my co-founder of Climate Trace, Gavin McCormack, to come up, and he and I are going to do a joint presentation on behalf of the 165 members of the Climate Trace Coalition, some of which, by the way, are here. Debbie Gordon of RMI is here, and Sashen Zachi from Trees Are Here—one of the leading experts in the world on oil and gas, one of the leading experts in the world on forests. John Christ of RMI is also here. Climate Trace is independent, privately funded. I want to thank my partners at Generation Investment Management: David Blood, Clara Barbie, and Eduardo Muarez. The partners actually provided some of the seed money to start this coalition, and the Generation Foundation continues to help finance it. And some of our friends from the Mindaroo Foundation are here as well. Andrew Forrest is not here, but we were with him a couple of days ago. And six years ago next month, Gavin McCormack and I co-founded the Climate Trace Coalition. We've been working very hard along with a lot of people who are here in this room. And without any further ado, I want to ask Gavin to come up and join me on stage, and together we're going to present this presentation. I'm told that some of these slides may have a little bit of a blue tint, but just don't worry about that.
33 years and five months ago, the entire world gathered here in Brazil for the Earth Summit. That's what started all of this COP process. It took three years before COP 1 was organized by the young environment minister of Germany, Angela Merkel. And here we are at COP 30, which is kind of a full circle moment. And of course, the purpose is to deal with the climate crisis. And this thin blue shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet is so thin—it's only 5 to 7 kilometers thick. It's blue because that's where the oxygen is. And we are using it as an open sewer for 175 million tons of man-made global warming pollution spewed into it every single day. It adds up. It lingers there. And the accumulated amount today will trap as much extra heat as would be released by 750,000 first-generation atomic bombs exploding on the Earth every 24 hours. Literally insane that we're allowing this to continue. In any case, the temperatures are going up because of that. Last year was the hottest year in recorded history, and the consequences have been spelled out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. One that needs more attention is drought. This is the prevalence of drought in the 1950s.
And there has been a 299% increase since then. Here's what it looks like today. 61% of all the land mass on Earth last year experienced at least one month of extreme drought. We have seen it right here in the Amazon region—the worst drought on record. And in the Colombian part of the Amazon River basin, the flow of the water receded 90%. We've seen it on every continent, including Europe, for example, where some farmers are abandoning their farms because of the continuing droughts. And when the temperatures reach record high levels—this was the all-time temperature record earlier this year in Turkey—the fires become much more common. In the last 20 years, the extreme fires have doubled in their intensity and their frequency. This is the third year in a row that Canada has had massive record-breaking fires. We smell the smoke in my farm in Tennessee in the south part of the US. It goes around the world actually now. And from fire to ice, Antarctica is beginning to melt much more rapidly. Just two weeks ago, a new study pointed out that this Hector glacier retreated 8 kilometers in only two months. That's 10 times faster than the previous record. You may have heard the news about this 600-year-old village in Switzerland. 90% of it was wiped out by a glacial avalanche. There are other such events around the world. It's most threatening in the Himalayan region. And we need to adapt as well as mitigate. But we need to also be realistic about the fact that some things, if we allow this insanity to continue using the sky as an open sewer, some things will be very difficult to adapt to.
So Greenland—in the hour that we have been here this morning, Greenland has lost another 30 million tons of ice. Every hour of every day, 30 million tons disappear from Greenland. That's one of the reasons The Economist had this cover story last year, saying that we could lose $2 trillion in the global housing market within the next 25 years because of sea level rise and other consequences of the climate crisis. If you look at all of the extra heat that's been trapped, that has been melting the ice and causing the droughts on the land and atmospheric temperatures, how does that compare to what's going into the oceans? 93% of all this extra heat goes into the oceans, down 2,000 meters and below. And shockingly, half of this increase has been in the last 20 years. This is one reason why, according to Johan Rockström and other experts, that the tipping point on corals may have been crossed. 84% of the world's coral reefs have been affected in the last two years. And of course, as the oceans heat up, they evaporate more moisture into the sky, and the atmospheric rivers become much stronger and much more frequent. This is one from the Gulf of Mexico that's quite persistent, coming into the southeastern part of the United States.
And so when those atmospheric rivers release their moisture, the downpours get much bigger. Some of the scientists call them rain bombs. Now, just a few days ago—just last week—1.7 meters of rain fell in 24 hours in the city of Hue, Vietnam. Five and a half feet in one day. This is unfortunately becoming quite common. Just six days ago, the first of two giant typhoons hit the Philippines. The second one hit two days ago. One million people were evacuated, half a million from the one last week. And on October 28th, this rapidly intensifying hurricane hit Jamaica. Incidentally, it hit Jamaica the exact same day that some well-known climate advocate said, 'Time to dial back the emphasis on climate mitigation and focus on one of the effects of the climate crisis.' Damages included perhaps one-third of the GDP of Jamaica. Just a thousand kilometers to the east, by the way, Simon Steele's home island Carriacou was devastated. 90% of the structures devastated one year earlier in Carriacou, where his grandmother still lives. So in September, half of India experienced massive flooding, hundreds of thousands of people displaced. A month before that, two million were affected by these downpours in Pakistan. 800 people killed. In China, there have been multiple rain bombs. This one dropped 54 centimeters in only eight hours. And here in Brazil, farther to the south in Rio Grande do Sul, they had another massive event this year, but one year earlier they had the worst flooding in the entire history of Brazil. 600,000 people displaced by this flooding. Flooding in my home state of Tennessee and neighboring North Carolina and that region—500 people were killed last fall by the downpours associated with Hurricane Helene. In four days, we had more water fall from the sky than falls over Iguazu Falls in two and a half years.
How long are we going to stand by and keep turning the thermostat up so that these kinds of events get even worse? And a thousand kilometers to the west of here, where the great confluence of the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimões form the Amazon River, these highly intelligent, conscious, special beings—the pink dolphins—are now in danger of extinction. And the biologists, to a person, warn us this is the most serious consequence of the climate crisis. But there are others, including climate refugees. We've seen a few million climate refugees trigger neo-authoritarianism and ultra-nationalism. The WHO climate group warns us that the areas that are now physiologically unlivable for human beings because of the temperature and humidity—relatively small in those dark areas—are now expanding and could, if we don't make rapid changes over the next 35 years, include heavily populated areas in India, Pakistan, Central America, Africa, South America, including Belém, by the way—that's in the area that could become physiologically unlivable right here where we are meeting.
So, you know, the same day that Bill Gates released his backtracking on climate, which got a rave review from Donald Trump, the very same day, the highly respected Lancet Commission released its update saying that these health threats from climate have reached unprecedented levels. And the WHO has long since said the climate crisis is the single biggest health threat facing humanity. So how is it that these represent a binary? We have to choose between them. It's as if we're looking for more money for health. You know, one place we could get it: the trillions of dollars that governments are using to subsidize fossil fuels and cause the worsening of the climate crisis. Now, of course, the elephant in the room in many rooms these days is the new administration of Donald Trump, which has ordered the EPA to stop collecting climate data. One of the many reasons why Climate Trace was formed was to give independent sources of accurate data. We look at the globe, and we have identified and measured all of the significant sources of global warming pollution. Every one of these columns represents, by its height, the extreme emissions. You can zoom in and click on the top of any column and see what is there. And I'm going to turn it over to Gavin now to tell you in more detail what we do.
